Fastest way to parse a date-time string to class Date

Question

I have a column with dates as character in the format 10/17/2017 12:00:00 AM. I want parse the string and keep only the date part as class Date, i.e. 2017-10-17. I am using -

df$ReportDate = as.Date(df$ReportDate, format = "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p") 
df$ReportDate = as.Date(format(df$ReportDate, "%Y-%m-%d"))

this works, but the dataframe has over 5 million rows so this takes close to two mins.

  user  system elapsed 
104.73    0.55  105.46 

Is there a faster and more efficient way to do this?

Solution

Note that as.Date will ignore junk after the date so this takes less than 10 seconds on my not particularly fast laptop:

xx <- rep("10/17/2017 12:00:00 AM", 5000000) # test input
system.time(as.Date(xx, "%m/%d/%Y"))
## user  system elapsed 
## 9.57    0.20    9.82