> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Peter Moore > Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 2:22 PM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] reformat time from hhmm > > 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"
You must have done this with 'times', not 'data'. strptime's first argument should be character data, not numeric and the default conversion of numeric to character changes 110->"110", not "0110". I like to use sprintf() (with its C syntax) to control the conversion: > strptime(sprintf("%04d", times), "%k%M") [1] "2010-06-03 01:10:00" "2010-06-03 02:30:00" "2010-06-03 04:59:00" "2010-06-03 10:01:00" "2010-06-03 12:38:00" [6] "2010-06-03 19:22:00" You could put the year-month-day part into the sprintf's format argument as well if you don't want it to use today's date for that. Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.