Converting date into timestamp in R using strptime() function - r

Question

I've read a txt file into R as a CSV. As I understand, R will not recognise the strings as timestamps automatically, so I’ll need to convert them from text values using the strptime() function.
Here's an input of my text file:
29/1/12 19:48
30/1/12 21:07
2/2/12 15:53
3/4/12 0:49
5/10/12 2:00
24/10/12 17:11
14/11/12 3:49
11/8/13 16:00
12/7/14 17:00
31/7/14 8:08
31/7/14 10:48
6/8/14 9:24
16/12/14 3:34
24/1/15 19:37
16/6/15 15:55
16/6/15 19:56
18/6/15 1:24
25/6/15 17:20
26/6/15 18:28
1/7/15 15:58
1/7/15 18:05
2/7/15 18:20
2/7/15 18:59
I have tried:
y <- strptime(timestamp, "%d/%m/%y %H:%M")
but keep on getting NA.
Can someone help me to solve this? Thank you.

Answer 1

# Make some sample data
timestamp <- c('29/1/12 19:48','30/1/12 21:07','2/2/12 15:53')
# Check that you are dealing characters not factors
str(timestamp)
#chr [1:3] "29/1/12 19:48" "30/1/12 21:07" "2/2/12 15:53"
# Best to specify the time zone when using striptime
strptime(timestamp, "%d/%m/%y %H:%M", tz = 'UTC')
#[1] "2012-01-29 19:48:00 UTC" "2012-01-30 21:07:00 UTC" "2012-02-02 15:53:00 UTC"
# The lubridate package is very useful for working with dates/times
library(lubridate)
lubridate::dmy_hm(timestamp)
#[1] "2012-01-29 19:48:00 UTC" "2012-01-30 21:07:00 UTC" "2012-02-02 15:53:00 UTC"