R – Problem Storing lubridate dates in a dataframe

When I’m trying to store date in a DF it is getting represented as a number instead of a data format. Here is my example.

library(lubridate)

df1 = data.frame(task = c('do somthing', 'do something else', 'do something more')
                 ,Start_date = c(NA, NA, NA))

Start_date = ymd("2023-12-01")
df1$Date_Start[1] = Start_date

Start_date     #this returns a "2023-12-01"
df1$Date_Start[1]  #this returns a 19692

I want df1$Date_Start[1] to store "2023-12-01"

>Solution :

You can specify directly your Date format:

library(lubridate)

df1 = data.frame(task = c('do somthing', 'do something else', 'do something more')
             ,Start_date = c(NA, NA, NA))

df1$Start_date[1] <- format(ymd("2023-12-01"), "%Y-%m-%d")