error in row name conversion in R for a data frame

Question

I'm using R 3.0.2 and I loaded a csv into a dataframe that I want to convert to xts format.

my data looks something like this

head(data)
          V1     V2      V3      V4      V5      V6      V7      V8      V9
1 1999-01-04 1.1812 1.18120 1.18120 1.18120 1.18120 1.18120 1.18120 1.18120
2 1999-01-05 1.1760 1.17860 1.17860 1.17860 1.17860 1.17860 1.17860 1.17860
3 1999-01-06 1.1636 1.17360 1.17360 1.17360 1.17360 1.17360 1.17360 1.17360
4 1999-01-07 1.1672 1.17200 1.17200 1.17200 1.17200 1.17200 1.17200 1.17200
5 1999-01-08 1.1554 1.16868 1.16868 1.16868 1.16868 1.16868 1.16868 1.16555
6 1999-01-11 1.1534 1.16613 1.16613 1.16613 1.16613 1.16613 1.16312 1.15990

following advice from this post I tried to convert the row name as follows

rownames(data) = data[1]

however I get the following error which I can't find my way around

Error in `row.names<-.data.frame`(`*tmp*`, value = value) : 
  invalid 'row.names' length

Answer 1

based off the very generous comments here is a simple solution

rownames(data) <- as.Date(data[,1]) 
dataxts <- xts(data[,-1], order.by=data[,1])