somewhere you are dealing with turning a character string into a date.
often dates can be ambigious
"20200305"
is this the 5th of march 2020 , or the 3rd of may 2020 ?
as.Date("20200305") # fails
as.Date("20200305", tryFormats = c("%Y%m%d")) # tell R its year month day i.e. march 5th
[1] "2020-03-05"