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  3. Working with Dates and Times in R

Exercise

Getting datetimes into R

Just like dates without times, if you want R to recognize a string as a datetime you need to convert it, although now you use as.POSIXct(). as.POSIXct() expects strings to be in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

The only tricky thing is that times will be interpreted in local time based on your machine's set up. You can check your timezone with Sys.timezone(). If you want the time to be interpreted in a different timezone, you just set the tz argument of as.POSIXct(). You'll learn more about time zones in Chapter 4.

In this exercise you'll input a couple of datetimes by hand and then see that read_csv() also handles datetimes automatically in a lot of cases.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Use as.POSIXct() and an appropriate string to input the datetime corresponding to Oct 1st 2010 at 12:12:00.
  • Enter the same datetime again, but now specify the timezone as "America/Los_Angeles".
  • Use read_csv() to read in rversions.csv again.
  • Examine the structure of the datetime column to verify read_csv() has correctly interpreted it as a datetime.