Is there a way to select one string value that contains the latest date relative to the values in the same list

I have a vector like this

c("The date is 1-2-23","Here it is 1-16-23",
"Here 2-16-23 is the latest", 
"4-3-23 is actually the latest","12-12-22 is the earliest")

I would like to be left with

Latest<-"4-3-23 is actually the latest"

Here is a pipeline to extract, sort, and pull the most recent:

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

data.frame(strings = c("The date is 1-2-23","Here it is 1-16-23",
                       "Here 2-16-23 is the latest", 
                       "4-3-23 is actually the latest","12-12-22 is the earliest")) %>% 
  mutate(date = as.Date(str_extract(strings, "(\\d+-?){3}"), "%m-%d-%y")) %>% 
  arrange(desc(date)) %>% 
  slice(1) %>% 
  pull(strings)

The most simple way to parse the dates seems to be mdy() from the lubridate package which is now part of the Tidyverse:

library(tidyverse)

x <- c(
  "The date is 1-2-23",
  "Here it is 1-16-23",
  "Here 2-16-23 is the latest",
  "4-3-23 is actually the latest",
  "12-12-22 is the earliest"
)

x[which.max(mdy(x))]
#> [1] "4-3-23 is actually the latest"

^{Created on 2023-04-10 with reprex v2.0.2}

Update: with have to use class date (thanks to @thelatemail):

max(as.Date(regmatches(vec, regexpr("\\d{1,2}-\\d{1,2}-\\d{2}", vec)), "%m-%d-%y"))

[1] "2023-04-03"

First answer:
We could do it this way:

1. Create regex to match date with format (mm-dd-yy)
2. with regmatches and regexpr extract the date
3. use max for latest date
4. use paste for string

paste(max(regmatches(vec, regexpr("\\d{1,2}-\\d{1,2}-\\d{2}", vec))), "is actually the latest")

"4-3-23 is actually the latest"

Parsing as.Date and ordering after getting the date string with sub

stri[order(as.Date(
   sub(".*(\\d+-\\d+-\\d+).*", "\", stri), "%m-%d-%y"), decreasing=T)[1]]
[1] "4-3-23 is actually the latest"

Data

stri <- c("The date is 1-2-23","Here it is 1-16-23",
"Here 2-16-23 is the latest", 
"4-3-23 is actually the latest","12-12-22 is the earliest")