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Asked: 2026-06-12T16:24:26+00:00

I often read data from Oracle into R . To get around the TIMESTAMP

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I often read data from Oracle into R. To get around the TIMESTAMP format in some of my tables, I read in the column in as a character string with TO_CHAR in my SQL statement.

However, I want to convert the data held in the string back into a date + time format that R can utilize. Unfortunately,I have no idea as to how to best do this, especially considering the AM/PM component. Stripping out the date is easy enough, but I have no idea as to how to retain the time part of each record.

Here are a few records of data:

c("31-JUL-12 10.08.35.432 AM", "31-JUL-12 08.53.18.316 AM", "18-JUL-12 01.17.52.939 PM", 
"13-AUG-12 05.34.11.405 PM", "15-AUG-12 02.04.31.505 PM", "21-AUG-12 09.10.03.976 AM"
)

One note: these data are timezone EST.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you deal with dates/times much, you should familiarize yourself with ?strptime

    > strptime(oracle, format='%d-%b-%y %I.%M.%OS %p', tz='America/New_York')
[1] "2012-07-31 10:08:35.432 EDT" "2012-07-31 08:53:18.316 EDT" "2012-07-18 13:17:52.939 EDT" "2012-08-13 17:34:11.405 EDT" "2012-08-15 14:04:31.505 EDT" "2012-08-21 09:10:03.976 EDT"

    Note that I assumed that by “EST” you really meant Eastern time in New York, NY. From help(timezone):

    Beware that some of these designations may not be what you think: in particular EST is a time zone used in Canada without daylight savings time, and not EST5EDT nor (Australian) Eastern Standard Time.

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