Remove part of the string in R - dropping some words from it
I wouldn't use them as time at first place. What would I do:

String &lt;- "Sat Jan 01 15:30:27 CET 2011"

As your dates have same number of elements in them we could just count what part of the String we would like to get.

date &lt;- substr(String, start = 5, stop = 10)

year &lt;- substr(String, start =25 , stop = 28)

Attach them togheter

final &lt;- paste(date,year, sep = " ")

as.Date(final, format = "%b %d %Y")

Little bit more information about as.Date
https://www.statmethods.net/input/dates.html
I hope it helps you :)