[R] R help!

Alex Roth alexsroth1 at gmail.com
Wed May 2 22:00:45 CEST 2012


Hello there, I was wondering if you could help me with a quick R issue.

I have a data set where one of the columns has both date and time in
it, e.g. "12/31/11 23:45" in one cell. I want to use R to split this
column into two new columns: date and time.

One of the problems with splitting here is that when the dates go into
single digits there are no 0's in front of months January-September
(e.g., January is represented by 1 as opposed to 01), so every entry
is a different length. Therefore, splitting by the space is the only
option, I think.

Here's the coding I've developed thus far:

z$dt <- z$Date                    #time and date is all under z$Date
foo <- strsplit(" ", z$dt)         #attempted split based on the space

And then if that were to work, I would proceed use the coding:

foo2 <- matrix(unlist(foo), ncol = 2, byrow=TRUE)
z$Date <- foo[ ,1]
z$Time <- foo[ ,2]

However, foo <- strsplit(" ", z$dt) isn't working. Do you know what
the problem is? If you could respond soon, that would be greatly
appreciated!

Thanks so much!
Alex



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