Hi,
I'm newish to R, a recent convert from Matlab... So far I'm impressed, and
determined to solve the following problem, which seems like it should be
easy:
I have a long (millions of points) data series recorded with a datalogger
that produced a timestamp in 4 columns: Year, Day of Year, Time in (H)HMM
and Seconds.  I would like to have R interpret these columns as a time
object and have made some progress (e.g., using paste() to create a single
column and then strptime() to interpret -- is that too roundabout??), but
one thing is throwing me off and I can't seem to conquer it.  The
hour-minute column in the raw data has no colon, so noon looks like "1200".
Morning times have only 3 characters and afternoon times have 4.  I've been
playing around with a fake set of times:
   times <- c(110, 230, 459, 1001, 1238, 1922)

When I use
   strptime(data, "%k%M")
the last three are interpreted fine but the first three are messed up
because, for some reason, (even though I use %k for hour format?) the first
two characters are assumed to be hour and the remaining one is minutes.  For
times[3] I get NA because R doesn't know what to do with 45 hours...
   [1] "2010-06-03 11:00:00" "2010-06-03 23:00:00" NA
   [4] "2010-06-03 10:01:00" "2010-06-03 12:38:00" "2010-06-03 19:22:00"

Fair enough, so I tried a different angle, using an if...else statement:
   hours <- if(nchar(times)>3) strtrim(times,2) else strtrim(times,1)

This worked great when times was only a vector of length=1, but when I try
to apply it to something larger, I get the following warning:
   Warning message:
     In  if(nchar(times)>3) strtrim(times,2) else strtrim(times,1)  :
     the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
and the output hours are only the first character.  Not entirely sure if I
understand this.

Any advice on how to do this?  Are there packages or commands that I'm not
aware of that know how to deal with (h)hmm times?

Thanks much,
-Pete
---------------------------------------------
platform       i486-pc-linux-gnu
arch           i486
os             linux-gnu
system         i486, linux-gnu
status
major          2
minor          10.1
year           2009
month          12
day            14
svn rev        50720
language       R
version.string R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)

-- 
Pete Moore
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dept. Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
Iowa State University

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