[R] Get current time in numeric form?

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

dmurdoch at pair.com (Duncan Murdoch) writes:

> As discussed in another thread, the date() function returns the
> current date and time (possibly in the wrong time zone on Windows).
> What I'm interested in getting is a value that I can do calculations
> with, to support animations.  That is, I'd like to get the current
> time, do a display, do some calculations, then get the current time
> again and calculate the update to the display based on the time
> difference.
> 
> Do I have to write my own external function, or is this already
> available somewhere?  (I could parse date(), but that will only give
> me 1 second resolution; I think the system clock will do better on
> most systems.)
> 
> (I know about system.time(), but I don't think it's quite appropriate:
> I don't just want to know how long the first display calculation took,
> I need to know the time at the start of the next one.  I'm worried
> that there will be slippage if I use system.time().)

Just to complete the discussion on date parsing,

unclass(as.POSIXct(strptime(date(),"%c"))) 

or

as.POSIXct(strptime(date(),"%c")) - structure(0,class="POSIXct")

gives the time in seconds since the beginning of time() (generally Jan
1 1970 0:00:00 GMT on Unixen).

However, I think proc.time()[3] is more relevant for your needs. 


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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