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Consider a string in the format 

test <- "YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000-08:00"

My goal is to convert those strings to POSIXct format so that I can plot the data. my initial thought was to use

as.POSIXct(test)

...but that seems to truncate the datetime to just date. Any thoughts? The help info for as.POSIXct seems to imply that the input should be date and time separated by a space, not by a "T". Is this my issue?

thelatemail
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CFrench
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1 Answers1

51

You need to specify a format for your conversion. Take a read of ?strptime to see all of the options for date formats.

#YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.000-08:00
test <- "2013-12-25T04:32:16.500-08:00"
z <- as.POSIXct(test,format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%OS")
op <- options(digits.secs = 3)
z
#[1] "2013-12-25 04:32:16.5 EST"
thelatemail
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  • Hey, thanks for your answer here. I have a Question too...`chr [1:10000] "2016-05-30 23:39:51 UTC" "2016-05-30 23:52:34 UTC"` is my data. So i get it to convert with `as.POSIXct`: as.POSIXct(df$event_ts_utc,format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS") working fine, except for the TIMECODE `"2016-05-30 23:39:51 CEST"`! Any Ideas? – Dan Dec 11 '17 at 13:02
  • did it! `as.POSIXct(df$event_ts_utc,format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", tz = "UTC")` – Dan Dec 11 '17 at 13:15
  • I had a slightly differently formatted date time stamp, so for me what worked was: `as.POSIXct("2019-03-15 16:17:42" , format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS")` – stevec May 12 '20 at 08:17