Thank you Jeff and Don. As I stated on my original posting that I am relatively new to R. After a few weeks of searching and reading I have come to the same point that Don made which is base R doesn’t have a class for time only. I explored the chron and lubridate packages and even looked at Ecfun package; the latter is too long and I did not have time to experiment with it. I think the lubridate package might be useful for this; but again I did not want to get into many packages. So I tried chron using the times function that produced what I want. Indeed as Don said, I could not figure out how to use it in a read.table; so I had already decided to do what Don suggested which is read them as character then convert them one vector at a time to time class.
What do I need this stuff for? Well, I published a paper 6 months ago where I had to deal with time data and needed to convert and manipulate time data. I did all that work in Excel and it took too long; so I want to learn R for future research and use the same data using R. I agree with Jeff’s comments. In fact, I learned most of them the hard way by trial and error and realized that it’s difficult to separate time and date using POSIXct and POSIXlt. Thanks again----EK [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.