To format Dates we use the format(date, format="%Y-%m-%d") function with either the POSIXct (given from as.POSIXct()) or POSIXlt (given from as.POSIXlt())

For more, see ?strptime.

R contains a Date class, which is created with as.Date(), which takes a string or vector of strings, and if the date is not in ISO 8601 date format YYYY-MM-DD, a formatting string of strptime-style tokens.

as.Date('2016-08-01')    # in ISO format, so does not require formatting string
## [1] "2016-08-01"

as.Date('05/23/16', format = '%m/%d/%y')
## [1] "2016-05-23"

as.Date('March 23rd, 2016', '%B %drd, %Y')    # add separators and literals to format
## [1] "2016-03-23"

as.Date('  2016-08-01  foo')    # leading whitespace and all trailing characters are ignored
## [1] "2016-08-01"

as.Date(c('2016-01-01', '2016-01-02'))
# [1] "2016-01-01" "2016-01-02"

To format Dates we use the format(date, format="%Y-%m-%d") function with either the POSIXct (given from as.POSIXct()) or POSIXlt (given from as.POSIXlt())

For more, see ?strptime.