Convert character to Date in R

The easiest way is to use lubridate:

library(lubridate)
prods.all$Date2 <- mdy(prods.all$Date2)

This function automatically returns objects of class POSIXct and will work with either factors or characters.

You may be overcomplicating things, is there any reason you need the stringr package?

 df <- data.frame(Date = c("10/9/2009 0:00:00", "10/15/2009 0:00:00"))
 as.Date(df$Date, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")

[1] "2009-10-09" "2009-10-15"

More generally and if you need the time component as well, use strptime:

strptime(df$Date, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")

I'm guessing at what your actual data might look at from the partial results you give.

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