r - as.Date with two-digit years

Question

If I convert the date 10.10.61 (DD.MM.YY) with as.Date(date, format="%d.%m.%y") for some reason it converts it into 2061-10-10.

Is there an elegant way to correct for this or do I have to do it manually by slicing the string and adding "19" in front?

I've also tried the zoo package which brings up the same (wrong) result.

Answer 1

x = format(as.Date("10.10.61", "%d.%m.%y"), "19%y-%m-%d")
x = as.Date(x)
x
class(x)