[R] factor conversion to date/time

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 02/05/2012 8:08 AM, marjolein post wrote:
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> Hi, I've been trying to convert numbers from an online temperature database
> into dates and time that R recognizes. I've tried as.Date, as.POSIXlt and strptime  the problem is that the database has put a T between the numbers and R will not accept any conversions. currently it sees the date as a factor with the format  as 1981-01-02T08:00I would like to keep only the year and month, but my primary focus is to get R to recognize it as a date.

To stop the conversion to factors, use argument stringsAsFactors=FALSE 
when you read the file, or even better, options(stringsAsFactors=FALSE) 
for a global change.

To convert a string, specify the format (following the instructions in 
?strptime):

x <- "1981-01-02T08:00I"
strptime(x, format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%MI")

Duncan Murdoch