Question

I have a timestamp data that has the following structure where the the date and time are presented in the following way:

timestamp
January 22,2013 20:56
January 22,2013 08:53
January 22,2013 20:59

What can I do to make this into a time object in R?
I was going to write a perl script to transform the data into YEAR-MONTH-TIME HH:MM:SS format and use POSIXct to import it into a date-time object, but i was wondering if there is a shortcut to do so in R.

Answer 1

You can use strptime

strptime('January 22,2013 20:56','%b %d,%Y %H:%M')
[1] "2013-01-22 20:56:00"

PS: this depends of your local:

Sys.setlocale('LC_TIME','FRENCH')
[1] "French_France.1252"

strptime('January 22,2013 20:56','%b %d,%Y %H:%M')
[1] NA
 Sys.setlocale('LC_TIME','ENGLISH')
[1] "English_United States.1252"
 strptime('January 22,2013 20:56','%b %d,%Y %H:%M')
[1] "2013-01-22 20:56:00"