Fast parsing with lubridate::fast_strptime

lubridate provides its own fast datetime parser: fast_strptime(). Instead of taking an order argument like parse_date_time() it takes a format argument and the format must comply with the strptime() style.

As you saw in the video that means any character that represents a datetime component must be prefixed with a % and any non-whitespace characters must be explicitly included.

Try parsing dates with fast_strptime() and then compare its speed to the other methods you've seen.

This exercise is part of the course

Working with Dates and Times in R

Exercise instructions

dates is in your workspace again.

Examine the head of dates. What components are present? What separators are used?
Parse dates with fast_strptime() by specifying the appropriate format string.
Compare the timing of fast_strptime() to fasttime and ymd_hms().

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Head of dates
head(___)

# Parse dates with fast_strptime
fast_strptime(dates, 
    format = ___) %>% str()

# Comparse speed to ymd_hms() and fasttime
microbenchmark(
  ymd_hms = ymd_hms(dates),
  fasttime = fastPOSIXct(dates),
  fast_strptime = ___(dates, 
    format = ___),
  times = 20)

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Working with Dates and Times in R

IntermediateSkill Level

4.8+

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R doesn't know something is a date or time unless you tell it. In this chapter you'll learn about some of the ways R stores dates and times by exploring how often R versions are released, and how quickly people download them. You'll also get a sneak peek at what you'll learn in the following chapters.

Exercise 1: Introduction to dates Exercise 2: Recognizing ISO 8601 dates Exercise 3: Specifying dates Exercise 4: Automatic import Exercise 5: Why use dates?Exercise 6: Plotting Exercise 7: Arithmetic and logical operators Exercise 8: What about times?Exercise 9: Getting datetimes into R Exercise 10: Datetimes behave nicely too Exercise 11: Why lubridate?

Dates and times come in a huge assortment of formats, so your first hurdle is often to parse the format you have into an R datetime. This chapter teaches you to import dates and times with the lubridate package. You'll also learn how to extract parts of a datetime. You'll practice by exploring the weather in R's birthplace, Auckland NZ.

Exercise 1: Parsing dates with lubridate Exercise 2: Selecting the right parsing function Exercise 3: Specifying an order with `parse_date_time()`Exercise 4: Weather in Auckland Exercise 5: Import daily weather data Exercise 6: Import hourly weather data Exercise 7: Extracting parts of a datetime Exercise 8: What can you extract?Exercise 9: Adding useful labels Exercise 10: Extracting for plotting Exercise 11: Extracting for filtering and summarizing Exercise 12: Rounding datetimes Exercise 13: Practice rounding Exercise 14: Rounding with the weather data

Getting datetimes into R is just the first step. Now that you know how to parse datetimes, you need to learn how to do calculations with them. In this chapter, you'll learn the different ways of representing spans of time with lubridate and how to leverage them to do arithmetic on datetimes. By the end of the chapter, you'll have calculated how long it's been since the first man stepped on the moon, generated sequences of dates to help schedule reminders, calculated when an eclipse occurs, and explored the reigns of monarch's of England (and which ones might have seen Halley's comet!).

Exercise 1: Taking differences of datetimes Exercise 2: How long has it been?Exercise 3: How many seconds are in a day?Exercise 4: Time spans.Exercise 5: Adding or subtracting a time span to a datetime Exercise 6: Duration or Period?Exercise 7: Arithmetic with timespans Exercise 8: Generating sequences of datetimes Exercise 9: The tricky thing about months Exercise 10: Intervals Exercise 11: Examining intervals. Reigns of kings and queens Exercise 12: Comparing intervals and datetimes Exercise 13: Converting to durations and periods

You now know most of what you need to tackle data that includes dates and times, but there are a few other problems you might encounter in practice. In this final chapter you'll learn a little more about these problems by returning to some of the earlier data examples and learning how to handle time zones, deal with times when you don't care about dates, parse dates quickly, and output dates and times.

Exercise 1: Time zones Exercise 2: Setting the timezone Exercise 3: Viewing in a timezone Exercise 4: Timezones in the weather data Exercise 5: Times without dates Exercise 6: More on importing and exporting datetimes Exercise 7: Fast parsing with fasttime Exercise 8: Fast parsing with lubridate::fast_strptime

Current Exercise

Exercise 9: Outputting pretty dates and times Exercise 10: Wrap-up