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 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.