strptime {base} | R Documentation |
Functions to convert between character representations and objects of
classes "POSIXlt"
and "POSIXct"
representing calendar
dates and times.
## S3 method for class 'POSIXct': format(x, format = "", tz = "", usetz = FALSE, ...) ## S3 method for class 'POSIXlt': format(x, format = "", usetz = FALSE, ...) ## S3 method for class 'POSIXt': as.character(x, ...) strftime(x, format="", usetz = FALSE, ...) strptime(x, format, tz = "") ISOdatetime(year, month, day, hour, min, sec, tz = "") ISOdate(year, month, day, hour = 12, min = 0, sec = 0, tz = "GMT")
x |
An object to be converted. |
tz |
A timezone specification to be used for the conversion.
System-specific, but "" is the current time zone, and
"GMT" is UTC. |
format |
A character string. The default is
"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" if any component has a time
component which is not midnight, and "%Y-%m-%d"
otherwise. |
... |
Further arguments to be passed from or to other methods. |
usetz |
logical. Should the timezone be appended to the output?
This is used in printing time, and as a workaround for problems with
using "%Z" on most Linux systems. |
year, month, day |
numerical values to specify a day. |
hour, min, sec |
numerical values for a time within a day. |
strftime
is an alias for format.POSIXlt
, and
format.POSIXct
first converts to class "POSIXlt"
by
calling as.POSIXlt
. Note that only that conversion
depends on the time zone.
The usual vector re-cycling rules are applied to x
and
format
so the answer will be of length that of the longer of the
vectors.
Locale-specific conversions to and from character strings are used
where appropriate and available. This affects the names of the days
and months, the AM/PM indicator (if used) and the separators in
formats such as %x
and %X
.
The details of the formats are system-specific, but the following are
defined by the ISO C / POSIX standard for strftime
and are
likely to be widely available. Any character in the format string other than
the %
escape sequences is interpreted literally
(and %%
gives %
).
%a
%A
%b
%B
%c
%d
%H
%I
%j
%m
%M
%p
%I
and not with %H
.%S
%U
%w
%W
%x
%X
%y
%Y
%z
-0800
is 8 hours west of Greenwich.%Z
Where leading zeros are shown they will be used on output but are optional on input.
Also defined in the current standards but less widely implemented (e.g. not for output on Windows) are
%F
%g
%V
).%G
%V
) as a decimal
number.%u
%V
Other format specifiers in common use include
%D
%m/%d/%y
.%k
%l
%n
%r
%R
%H:%M
.%t
%T
%H:%M:%S
.
There are also %O[dHImMSUVwWy]
which may emit numbers in an
alternative local-dependent format (e.g. roman numerals), and
%E[cCyYxX]
which can use an alternative ‘era’
(e.g. a different religious calendar). Which of these are supported is
OS-dependent.
ISOdatetime
and ISOdate
are convenience wrappers for
strptime
, that differ only in their defaults and that
ISOdate
sets a timezone. (For dates without times is would be
better to use the "Date"
class.)
The format
methods and strftime
return character vectors
representing the time.
strptime
turns character representations into an object of
class "POSIXlt"
. The timezone is used to set the isdst
component.
ISOdatetime
and ISOdate
return an object of class
"POSIXct"
.
The default formats follow the rules of the ISO 8601 international
standard which expresses a day as "2001-02-28"
and a time as
"14:01:02"
using leading zeroes as here. The ISO form uses no
space to separate dates and times.
If the date string does not specify the date completely, the returned
answer may be system-specific. The most common behaviour is to assume
that unspecified seconds, minutes or hours are zero, and a missing
year, month or day is the current one. If it specifies a date
incorrectly, reliable implementations will give an error and the date
is reported as NA
. Unfortunately some common implementations
(such as glibc) are unreliable and guess at the intended meaning.
If the timezone specified is invalid on your system, what happens is system-specific but it will probably be ignored.
OS facilities will probably not print years before 1CE (aka 1AD) correctly.
Remember that in most timezones some times do not occur and some occur twice because of transitions to/from summer time.
International Organization for Standardization (1988, 1997, ...) ISO 8601. Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times. The 1997 version is available on-line at ftp://ftp.qsl.net/pub/g1smd/8601v03.pdf
DateTimeClasses for details of the date-time classes;
locales
to query or set a locale.
Your system's help pages on strftime
and strptime
to
see how to specify their formats.
## locale-specific version of date() format(Sys.time(), "%a %b %d %X %Y %Z") ## read in date info in format 'ddmmmyyyy' ## This will give NA(s) in some locales; setting the C locale ## as in the commented lines will overcome this on most systems. ## lct <- Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME"); Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C") x <- c("1jan1960", "2jan1960", "31mar1960", "30jul1960") z <- strptime(x, "%d%b%Y") ## Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", lct) z ## read in date/time info in format 'm/d/y h:m:s' dates <- c("02/27/92", "02/27/92", "01/14/92", "02/28/92", "02/01/92") times <- c("23:03:20", "22:29:56", "01:03:30", "18:21:03", "16:56:26") x <- paste(dates, times) z <- strptime(x, "%m/%d/%y %H:%M:%S") z