title: Extract Date in R
body: <p>I struggle mightily with dates in R and could do this pretty easily in SPSS, but I would love to stay within R for my project.  </p>
  
  <p>I have a date column in my data frame and want to remove the year completely in order to leave the month and day.  Here is a peak at my original data.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; head(ds$date)
  [1] "2003-10-09" "2003-10-11" "2003-10-13" "2003-10-15" "2003-10-18" "2003-10-20"
  &gt; class((ds$date))
  [1] "Date"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I "want" it to be.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; head(ds$date)
  [1] "10-09" "10-11" "10-13" "10-15" "10-18" "10-20"
  &gt; class((ds$date))
  [1] "Date"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If possible, I would love to set the first date to be October 1st instead of January 1st.</p>
  
  <p>Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:  I felt like I should add some context.  I want to plot an NHL player's performance over the course of a season which starts in October and ends in April.  To add to this, I would like to facet the plots by each season which is a separate column in my data frame.  Because I want to compare cumulative performance over the course of the season, I believe that I need to remove the year portion, but maybe I don't; as I indicated, I struggle with dates in R.  What I am looking to accomplish is a plot that compares cumulative performance over relative dates by season and have the x-axis start in October and end in April.  </p>