My goal is to create a vector of POSIXct time stamps given a start, an end and a delta (15min, 1hour, 1day). I hoped I could use seq for this, but I have a problem converting between the numeric and POSIXct representation:
now <- Sys.time()
now
# [1] "2012-01-19 10:30:39 CET"
as.POSIXct(as.double(now), origin="1970-01-01", tz="CET")
# [1] "2012-01-19 09:30:39 CET"
as.POSIXct(as.double(now), origin=as.POSIXct("1970-01-01", tz="CET"), tz="CET")
# [1] "2012-01-19 09:30:39 CET"
One hour gets lost during this conversion. What am I doing wrong?
There is a seq() method for objects of class "POSIXt" which is the super class of the "POSIXlt" and "POSIXct" classes. As such you don't need to do any conversion.
> now <- Sys.time()
> tseq <- seq(from = now, length.out = 100, by = "mins")
> length(tseq)
[1] 100
> head(tseq)
[1] "2012-01-19 10:52:38 GMT" "2012-01-19 10:53:38 GMT"
[3] "2012-01-19 10:54:38 GMT" "2012-01-19 10:55:38 GMT"
[5] "2012-01-19 10:56:38 GMT" "2012-01-19 10:57:38 GMT"
You have to be aware that when converting from POSIXct to numeric, R takes the timezone into account but always starts counting from a GMT origin :
> xgmt <- as.POSIXct('2011-01-01 14:00:00',tz='GMT')
> xest <- as.POSIXct('2011-01-01 14:00:00',tz='EST')
> (as.numeric(xgmt) - as.numeric(xest)) / 3600
[1] -5
As you see, the time in EST is conceived to be five hours earlier than the time in GMT, which is the time difference between both timezones. It's that value that is saved internally.
The as.POSIXCT() function just adds an attribute containing the timezone. It doesn't alter the value, so you get the time presented in GMT time, but with an attribute telling it is EST. This also means that once you go from POSIXct to numeric, you should treat your data as if it's GMT time. (It's a whole lot more complex than that, but it's the general idea). So you have to calculate the offset as follows:
> nest <- as.numeric(xest)
> origin <- as.POSIXct('1970-01-01 00:00:00',tz='EST')
> offset <- as.numeric(origin)
> as.POSIXct(nest-offset,origin=origin)
[1] "2011-01-01 14:00:00 EST"
This works whatever the timezone is in your locale (in my case, that's actually CET). Also note that behaviour of timezone data can differ between systems.
These time zone issues are always fiddly, but I think the problem is that your origin is being calculated in the wrong time zone (since the string only specifies the date).
Try using origin <- now - as.numeric(now).
Alternatively, use lubridate::origin, which is the string "1970-01-01 UTC".
A full solution, again using lubridate.
start <- now()
seq(start, start + days(3), by = "15 min")
I do not have an answer to your problem, but I do have an alternative way of creating vectors of POSIXct objects. If, for example, you want to create a vector of 1000 timestamps from now with a delta_t of 15 minutes:
now = Sys.time()
dt = 15 * 60 # in seconds
timestamps = now + seq(0, 1000) * dt
> head(timestamps)
[1] "2012-01-19 11:17:46 CET" "2012-01-19 11:32:46 CET"
[3] "2012-01-19 11:47:46 CET" "2012-01-19 12:02:46 CET"
[5] "2012-01-19 12:17:46 CET" "2012-01-19 12:32:46 CET"
The trick is you can add a vector of seconds to a POSIXct object.
An alternative to using seq.POSIXt is xts::timeBasedSeq, which allows you to specify the sequence as a string:
library(xts)
now <- Sys.time()
timeBasedSeq(paste("2012-01-01/",format(now),"/H",sep="")) # Hourly steps
timeBasedSeq(paste("2012-01-01/",format(now),"/d",sep="")) # Daily steps
You need to use seq(from=start,to=end, by=step). Note that in step you can either use "days" or an integer defining how many seconds elapse from item to item.
Related
I was using the difftime function from the base package in R and based on my data I found a couple of weird return values of this function:
> difftime("2014-10-29", "2014-10-21", units = "days")
Time difference of 8.041667 days
> difftime("2020-4-04", "2020-3-28", units = "days")
Time difference of 6.958333 days
Any idea why those values are not integers? Thanks!
All I see in the doc, relevant to it is:
"Note that units = "days" means a period of 24 hours, hence takes no account of Daylight Savings Time. Differences in objects of class "Date" are computed as if in the UTC time zone."
I think you should use as.Date to wrap your date strings, e.g.,
> difftime(as.Date("2014-10-29"), as.Date("2014-10-21"), units = "days")
Time difference of 8 days
> difftime(as.Date("2020-4-04"), as.Date("2020-3-28"), units = "days")
Time difference of 7 days
You can observe the difference with or without as.Date
> (a1 <- as.POSIXct("2014-10-29"))
[1] "2014-10-29 CET"
> (a2 <- as.POSIXct("2014-10-21"))
[1] "2014-10-21 CEST"
> (b1 <- as.POSIXct(as.Date("2014-10-29")))
[1] "2014-10-29 01:00:00 CET"
> (b2 <- as.POSIXct(as.Date("2014-10-21")))
[1] "2014-10-21 02:00:00 CEST"
> c(a1, b1)
[1] "2014-10-29 00:00:00 CET" "2014-10-29 01:00:00 CET"
> c(a2, b2)
[1] "2014-10-21 00:00:00 CEST" "2014-10-21 02:00:00 CEST"
The difftime-function uses as.POSIXct() not as.Date() to convert strings to dates, and this includes the system-specific time-zone (if not otherwise provided). Those pairs of dates contain the change to and from summertime in many time-zones, which may be why the time interval is not an integer.
I have a DateTime object in R.
tempDateTime<-as.POSIXct("2017-07-13 01:40:00 MDT")
class(tempDateTime)
[1] "POSIXct" "POSIXt"
I would like to drop the minutes from the DateTime object. ie have "2017-07-13 01:00:00 MDT"
Is there a simple way to do this?
In Base R
trunc(tempDateTime, units = "hours")
# "2017-07-13 01:00:00 AEST"
This works because the round function in base R has a method to handle POSIX objects.
From ?round.POSIXt
Round or truncate date-time objects.
As #Thelatemail points out, this returns a POSIXlt object, so you may want to wrap the result in as.POSIXct() again.
Another note, POSIXct is an object that stores the number of seconds since "1970-01-01 00:00:00" (the Unix epoch).
as.numeric(tempDateTime)
# 1499874000
So the manual way to round-down the hours would be
as.POSIXct(floor(as.numeric(tempDateTime) / 3600) * 3600, origin = "1970-01-01")
Try this:
library(lubridate)
> floor_date(tempDateTime, "hour")
[1] "2017-07-13 01:00:00 PDT"
I’m having difficulties with a date time problem. My data frame looks like this and I want to find the duration that each person watches TV.
Start.Time <- c(193221,201231,152324,182243,123432,192245)
End.Time <- c(202013,211232,154521,183422,133121,201513)
cbind(Start.Time,End.Time)
I have tried different methods to convert them in order to be able to make calculation but I didn’t produce any significant results.
as.POSIXct(Start.Time , origin="2015-11-01")
My results are completely wrong
[1] "2015-11-03 05:40:21 GMT" "2015-11-03 07:53:51 GMT"
[3] "2015-11-02 18:18:44 GMT" "2015-11-03 02:37:23 GMT"
[5] "2015-11-02 10:17:12 GMT" "2015-11-03 05:24:05 GMT"
For example I want 193221 to become 19:32:21 HH:MM:SS
Is there a package out there that easily does the conversion? and if its possible i don't want the date displayed, just the time.
You can convert your numbers to actual time stamps (in POSIXct format) like this:
Start.Time <- c(193221,201231,152324,182243,123432,192245)
Start.POSIX <- as.POSIXct(as.character(Start.Time), format = "%H%M%S")
Start.POSIX
## [1] "2015-12-19 19:32:21 CET" "2015-12-19 20:12:31 CET" "2015-12-19 15:23:24 CET"
## [4] "2015-12-19 18:22:43 CET" "2015-12-19 12:34:32 CET" "2015-12-19 19:22:45 CET"
As you can see, as.POSIXct assumes the times to belong to the current date. POSIXct alway denotes a specific moment in time and thus contains not only a time but also a date. You can now easily do calculations with these:
End.Time <- c(202013,211232,154521,183422,133121,201513)
End.POSIX <- as.POSIXct(as.character(End.Time), format = "%H%M%S")
End.POSIX - Start.POSIX
## Time differences in mins
## [1] 47.86667 60.01667 21.95000 11.65000 56.81667 52.46667
When you print the POSIXct objects (as I did above with Start.POSIX) they are acutally converted to characters and these are printed. You can see this, because there are " around the dates. You can control the format that is used when printing and thus, you could print the times only as follows:
format(Start.POSIX, "%H:%M:%S")
## [1] "19:32:21" "20:12:31" "15:23:24" "18:22:43" "12:34:32" "19:22:45"
I am puzzled with this result:
a = "2008-03-03 12:30:38"
#I convert to POSIXct and set the timezone
dt = as.POSIXct(a, format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", tz='Europe/Paris')
dt
[1] "2008-03-03 12:30:38 CET"
unclass(dt)
[1] 1204543838
attr(,"tzone")
[1] "Europe/Paris"
#I want to come back to POSIXct
as.POSIXct(unclass(dt), origin='1970-01-01', tz='Europe/Paris')
[1] "2008-03-03 11:30:38 CET"
I would have expected to get back the date-time a, what is wrong here ?
As it says in ?as.POSIXct, the origin is in tz="GMT".
You can use .POSIXct instead:
.POSIXct(unclass(dt), tz='Europe/Paris')
# [1] "2008-03-03 12:30:38 CET"
You may want to check the attribute:
isdst
To see if there is some Daylight Savings conversion going on in there somewhere.
This page from the R manual on Date-Time Classes may be useful
How would I extract the time from a series of POSIXct objects discarding the date part?
For instance, I have:
times <- structure(c(1331086009.50098, 1331091427.42461, 1331252565.99979,
1331252675.81601, 1331262597.72474, 1331262641.11786, 1331269557.4059,
1331278779.26727, 1331448476.96126, 1331452596.13806), class = c("POSIXct",
"POSIXt"))
which corresponds to these dates:
"2012-03-07 03:06:49 CET" "2012-03-07 04:37:07 CET"
"2012-03-09 01:22:45 CET" "2012-03-09 01:24:35 CET"
"2012-03-09 04:09:57 CET" "2012-03-09 04:10:41 CET"
"2012-03-09 06:05:57 CET" "2012-03-09 08:39:39 CET"
"2012-03-11 07:47:56 CET" "2012-03-11 08:56:36 CET"
Now, I have some values for a parameter measured at those times:
val <- c(1.25343125e-05, 0.00022890575,
3.9269125e-05, 0.0002285681875,
4.26353125e-05, 5.982625e-05,
2.09575e-05, 0.0001516951251,
2.653125e-05, 0.0001021391875)
I would like to plot val vs time of the day, irrespectively of the specific day when val was measured.
Is there a specific function that would allow me to do that?
You can use strftime to convert datetimes to any character format:
> t <- strftime(times, format="%H:%M:%S")
> t
[1] "02:06:49" "03:37:07" "00:22:45" "00:24:35" "03:09:57" "03:10:41"
[7] "05:05:57" "07:39:39" "06:47:56" "07:56:36"
But that doesn't help very much, since you want to plot your data. One workaround is to strip the date element from your times, and then to add an identical date to all of your times:
> xx <- as.POSIXct(t, format="%H:%M:%S")
> xx
[1] "2012-03-23 02:06:49 GMT" "2012-03-23 03:37:07 GMT"
[3] "2012-03-23 00:22:45 GMT" "2012-03-23 00:24:35 GMT"
[5] "2012-03-23 03:09:57 GMT" "2012-03-23 03:10:41 GMT"
[7] "2012-03-23 05:05:57 GMT" "2012-03-23 07:39:39 GMT"
[9] "2012-03-23 06:47:56 GMT" "2012-03-23 07:56:36 GMT"
Now you can use these datetime objects in your plot:
plot(xx, rnorm(length(xx)), xlab="Time", ylab="Random value")
For more help, see ?DateTimeClasses
The data.table package has a function 'as.ITime', which can do this efficiently use below:
library(data.table)
x <- "2012-03-07 03:06:49 CET"
as.IDate(x) # Output is "2012-03-07"
as.ITime(x) # Output is "03:06:49"
There have been previous answers that showed the trick. In essence:
you must retain POSIXct types to take advantage of all the existing plotting functions
if you want to 'overlay' several days worth on a single plot, highlighting the intra-daily variation, the best trick is too ...
impose the same day (and month and even year if need be, which is not the case here)
which you can do by overriding the day-of-month and month components when in POSIXlt representation, or just by offsetting the 'delta' relative to 0:00:00 between the different days.
So with times and val as helpfully provided by you:
## impose month and day based on first obs
ntimes <- as.POSIXlt(times) # convert to 'POSIX list type'
ntimes$mday <- ntimes[1]$mday # and $mon if it differs too
ntimes <- as.POSIXct(ntimes) # convert back
par(mfrow=c(2,1))
plot(times,val) # old times
plot(ntimes,val) # new times
yields this contrasting the original and modified time scales:
Here's an update for those looking for a tidyverse method to extract hh:mm::ss.sssss from a POSIXct object. Note that time zone is not included in the output.
library(hms)
as_hms(times)
Many solutions have been provided, but I have not seen this one, which uses package chron:
hours = times(strftime(times, format="%T"))
plot(val~hours)
(sorry, I am not entitled to post an image, you'll have to plot it yourself)
I can't find anything that deals with clock times exactly, so I'd just use some functions from package:lubridate and work with seconds-since-midnight:
require(lubridate)
clockS = function(t){hour(t)*3600+minute(t)*60+second(t)}
plot(clockS(times),val)
You might then want to look at some of the axis code to figure out how to label axes nicely.
The time_t value for midnight GMT is always divisible by 86400 (24 * 3600). The value for seconds-since-midnight GMT is thus time %% 86400.
The hour in GMT is (time %% 86400) / 3600 and this can be used as the x-axis of the plot:
plot((as.numeric(times) %% 86400)/3600, val)
To adjust for a time zone, adjust the time before taking the modulus, by adding the number of seconds that your time zone is ahead of GMT. For example, US central daylight saving time (CDT) is 5 hours behind GMT. To plot against the time in CDT, the following expression is used:
plot(((as.numeric(times) - 5*3600) %% 86400)/3600, val)