as.POSIX*: Date-time Conversion Functions

Description

Functions to manipulate objects of classes "POSIXlt" and "POSIXct" representing calendar dates and times.

Usage

as.POSIXct(x, tz = "", …)
as.POSIXlt(x, tz = "", …)
# S3 method for character
as.POSIXlt(x, tz = "", format, …)
# S3 method for numeric
as.POSIXlt(x, tz = "", origin, …)
# S3 method for POSIXlt
as.double(x, …)

Arguments

An object to be converted.

A time zone specification to be used for the conversion, if one is required. System-specific (see time zones), but "" is the current time zone, and "GMT" is UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated). Invalid values are most commonly treated as UTC, on some platforms with a warning.

…

further arguments to be passed to or from other methods.

format

character string giving a date-time format as used by strptime.

origin

a date-time object, or something which can be coerced by as.POSIXct(tz = "GMT") to such an object.

Value

as.POSIXct and as.POSIXlt return an object of the appropriate class. If tz was specified, as.POSIXlt will give an appropriate "tzone" attribute. Date-times known to be invalid will be returned as NA.

Details

The as.POSIX* functions convert an object to one of the two classes used to represent date/times (calendar dates plus time to the nearest second). They can convert a wide variety of objects, including objects of the other class and of classes "Date", "date" (from package date), "chron" and "dates" (from package chron) to these classes. Dates without times are treated as being at midnight UTC.

They can also convert character strings of the formats "2001-02-03" and "2001/02/03" optionally followed by white space and a time in the format "14:52" or "14:52:03". (Formats such as "01/02/03" are ambiguous but can be converted via a format specification by strptime.) Fractional seconds are allowed. Alternatively, format can be specified for character vectors or factors: if it is not specified and no standard format works for all non-NA inputs an error is thrown.

If format is specified, remember that some of the format specifications are locale-specific, and you may need to set the LC_TIME category appropriately via Sys.setlocale. This most often affects the use of %b, %B (month names) and %p (AM/PM).

Logical NAs can be converted to either of the classes, but no other logical vectors can be.

If you are given a numeric time as the number of seconds since an epoch, see the examples.

Character input is first converted to class "POSIXlt" by strptime: numeric input is first converted to "POSIXct". Any conversion that needs to go between the two date-time classes requires a time zone: conversion from "POSIXlt" to "POSIXct" will validate times in the selected time zone. One issue is what happens at transitions to and from DST, for example in the UK

as.POSIXct(strptime("2011-03-27 01:30:00", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))
as.POSIXct(strptime("2010-10-31 01:30:00", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

are respectively invalid (the clocks went forward at 1:00 GMT to 2:00 BST) and ambiguous (the clocks went back at 2:00 BST to 1:00 GMT). What happens in such cases is OS-specific: one should expect the first to be NA, but the second could be interpreted as either BST or GMT (and common OSes give both possible values). Note too (see strftime) that OS facilities may not format invalid times correctly.

Examples

Run this code


## These may not be correct names on your system
as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "America/New_York")  # in New York
as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "EST5EDT")           # alternative.
as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "EST" )   # somewhere in Eastern Canada
as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "HST")    # in Hawaii
as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "Australia/Darwin")


cols <- c("code", "coordinates", "TZ", "comments")
tmp <- read.delim(file.path(R.home("share"), "zoneinfo", "zone.tab"),
                  header = FALSE, comment.char = "#", col.names = cols)
if(interactive()) View(tmp)

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