I've been trying to understand the as.Date functionality and I have a date and time stamp field that looks like this:
"Tue Sep 15 09:22:09 -0600 2009" and I need to turn it into an R Date object for analysis. Simple date conversions I have down, no problem: > adate = c("7/30/1959") > as.Date(adate,"%m/%d/%Y") [1] "1959-07-30" > But when it comes to the type of date/time string format I have above, I can't figure out a format string that will work. The timezone offset is one part that causes problems. Building up to a working format string for the full time stamp string, I can make it as far as: > adate = c("Tue Sep 15 09:22:09 -0600 2009") > as.Date(adate,format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S") [1] "2009-09-15" (apparently year defaults to current year when it's not specified in the format string). Because the Year comes after the timezone offset, I have to deal with the timezone offset in the format string. But when I get to the timezone offset value I can't use "%z" or "%Z" because those are "output only" > as.Date(adate,format="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y") [1] NA I'm close, but can't incorporate the timezone offset field in the date/time stamp string. What am I missing? I suppose one workaround is to split the date/time string into its component parts, reassemble it into a string as.Date can deal with, but that seems to defeat one of the purposes of as.Date's format capability. Any advice for how to translate a "Tue Sep 15 09:22:09 -0600 2009" into an R Date object? Landon -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Simple-as.Date-question-dealing-with-a-timezone-offset-tp25491955p25491955.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.