[R] Doing things with POSIXt

[Vadim Ogranovich]

Sorry, I sent an incomplete mail before, here is a complete one.

Dear R-Users,

I have a csv data file with timestamps and I wanted to use POSIXct time data
type to represent the respective column. I played around with the type and
found a couple of issues:

* there seems to be no direct way of reading datetimes into a variable.
Let's say this is my file, named t,
"1992-02-27 23:03:20 PST"
"1992-02-27 22:29:56 PST"
"1992-01-14 01:03:30 PST"

then
> scan("t", what=list(as.POSIXct("1992-01-14 01:03:30 PST")))
Error in scan("t", what = list(as.POSIXct("1992-01-14 01:03:30 PST"))) : 
	"scan" expected a real, got ""1992-02-27"

The only way to read datetimes I could come up with is to first read them as
characters and then convert using strptime. This is OK, but the way I tried
it looks cleaner to me.

* Suppose 'datetime' is a vector of POSIXct. I want to index all elements
that are after 1am. Apparently there is no easy way of doing this (for
example there is no access function daytime(POSIXt)), or hour(POSIXt), or
anything like this).
To write my own function I tried to follow this line:
datetime <- as.POSIXct("1992-01-14 01:03:30 PST")
midnight <- trunc.POSIXt(datetime, "days")
isAfter1am <- difftime(datetime, midnight, "hours") >= 1	# should
yield TRUE

This didn't work since difftime(datetime, midnight, "hours") returned 
'Time difference of 9.058333 hours'
which is wrong

If I call difftime without the "hours" argument, i.e. difftime(datetime,
midnight), then it works fine:
'Time difference of 1.058333 hours'
I could probably use this latter version, but I need to gain some confidence
and understand what's going on with difftime(datetime, midnight, "hours").

Any clue?

Thanks, Vadim

P.S. I run R on Red Hat 7.2
> R.Version()
$platform
[1] "i686-pc-linux-gnu"

$arch
[1] "i686"

$os
[1] "linux-gnu"

$system
[1] "i686, linux-gnu"

$status
[1] ""

$major
[1] "1"

$minor
[1] "3.1"

$year
[1] "2001"

$month
[1] "08"

$day
[1] "31"

$language
[1] "R"

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