[R] R help!

[Berend Hasselman]

On 02-05-2012, at 22:00, Alex Roth wrote:

> 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!

Have a look at the help for strsplit.
You seem to have the arguments of strsplit the wrong way around.

strsplit(z$dt, " ")

Berend