Obtaining or subsetting the first 5 minutes of each day of data from an xts - r

Question

I would like to subset out the first 5 minutes of time series data for each day from minutely data, however the first 5 minutes do not occur at the same time each day thus using something like xtsobj["T09:00/T09:05"] would not work since the beginning of the first 5 minutes changes. i.e. sometimes it starts at 9:20am or some other random time in the morning instead of 9am.
So far, I have been able to subset out the first minute for each day using a function like:
k <- diff(index(xtsobj))> 10000
xtsobj[c(1, which(k)+1)]
i.e. finding gaps in the data that are larger than 10000 seconds, but going from that to finding the first 5 minutes of each day is proving more difficult as the data is not always evenly spaced out. I.e. between first minute and 5th minute there could be from 2 row to 5 rows and thus using something like:
xtsobj[c(1, which(k)+6)]
and then binding the results together
is not always accurate. I was hoping that a function like 'first' could be used, but wasn't sure how to do this for multiple days, perhaps this might be the optimal solution. Is there a better way of obtaining this information?
Many thanks for the stackoverflow community in advance.

Answer 1

split(xtsobj, "days") will create a list with an xts object for each day.
Then you can apply head to the each day
lapply(split(xtsobj, "days"), head, 5)
or more generally
lapply(split(xtsobj, "days"), function(x) {
x[1:5, ]
})
Finally, you can rbind the days back together if you want.
do.call(rbind, lapply(split(xtsobj, "days"), function(x) x[1:5, ]))

Answer 2

What about you use the package lubridate, first find out the starting point each day that according to you changes sort of randomly, and then use the function minutes
So it would be something like:
five_minutes_after = starting_point_each_day + minutes(5)
Then you can use the usual subset of xts doing something like:
5_min_period = paste(starting_point_each_day,five_minutes_after,sep='/')
xtsobj[5_min_period]
Edit:
#Joshua
I think this works, look at this example:
library(lubridate)
x <- xts(cumsum(rnorm(20, 0, 0.1)), Sys.time() - seq(60,1200,60))
starting_point_each_day= index(x[1])
five_minutes_after = index(x[1]) + minutes(5)
five_min_period = paste(starting_point_each_day,five_minutes_after,sep='/')
x[five_min_period]
In my previous example I made a mistake, I put the five_min_period between quotes.
Was that what you were pointing out Joshua? Also maybe the starting point is not necessary, just:
until5min=paste('/',five_minutes_after,sep="")
x[until5min]