[R] Reading and converting time data via read.table

[Ek Esawi]

Thank you Jeff and Don. As I stated on my original posting that I am
relatively new to R. After a few weeks of searching and reading I have come
to the same point that Don made which is base R doesn’t have a class for
time only. I explored the chron and lubridate packages and even looked at Ecfun
package; the latter is too long and I did not have time to experiment with
it. I think the lubridate package might be useful for this; but again I did
not want to get into many packages. So I tried chron using the times
function that produced what I want. Indeed as Don said, I could not figure
out how to use it in a read.table; so I had already decided to do what Don
suggested which is read them as character then convert them one vector at a
time to time class.



What do I need this stuff for? Well, I published a paper 6 months ago where
I had to deal with time data and needed to convert and manipulate time
data. I did all that work in Excel and it took too long; so I want to learn
R for future research and use the same data using R.



I agree with Jeff’s comments. In fact, I learned most of them the hard way
by trial and error and realized that it’s difficult to separate time and
date using POSIXct and POSIXlt.



Thanks again----EK

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