[R] Help with strftime error "character string is not in a standard unambiguous format"

[Daniel Nordlund]

On 9/11/2016 10:57 PM, Chris Evans wrote:
> I am trying to read activity data created by Garmin. It outputs dates like this:
>
> "Thu, 25 Aug 2016 6:34 PM"
>
> The problem that has stumped me is this:
>
>> strftime("Thu, 25 Aug 2016 6:34 PM",format="%a, %d %b %Y %I:%M %p")
> Error in as.POSIXlt.character(x, tz = tz) :
>   character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
>
> I _thought_ I had this running OK but that error is catching me now.  I think I've read ?strftime and written that format string correctly to match the input but I'm stumped now.
>
> Can someone advise me?  Many thanks in advance,
>
> Chris
>
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21)
> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
> Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 10586)
>
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252
> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252
> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252
> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
> [5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] compiler_3.3.1 tools_3.3.1
>>
>
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>

I have always used strptime() for this task, and

 > strptime("Thu, 25 Aug 2016 6:34 PM",format="%a, %d %b %Y %I:%M %p")
[1] "2016-08-25 18:34:00 PDT"

works for me.


Hope this is helpful,

Dan

-- 
Daniel Nordlund
Port Townsend, WA  USA