How to round a time?

Question

I have a vector of hours. For example:

vec.hours <- c("15:52:00", "15:56:00", "12:10:00", "15:12:00",  "11:49:00" ,"13:35:00", "14:53:00")

I would like to round the hours to get the new hours that will be the nearest whole 5 minutes, like this.

round.hours <- c("15:50:00", "16:00:00", "12:10:00", "15:10:00",  "11:50:00" ,"13:35:00", "14:55:00" )

I tried this

hour <- strptime(vec.hours , "%H:%M:%S")
round.hour <- round(hour , "mins")

But it isn't working.

After for each round.hours I want to do +/- one hour, for example like this:

hour.rd <- strptime(round.hours[1] , "%H:%M:%S")
hourM <- hour.rd - 3600
hourP <- hour.rd + 3600
l.tm <- timeSequence(from = hourM, to = hourP,format = "%H-%S-%M",by="5 min",FinCenter = "Europe/Zurich")

so, for 15:50:00 I have a vector of times from 14:50 until 16:50.

I dont know how to get round.hour from vec.hours.

Many thanks

Answer 1

The Lubridate package has the very friendly round_date function.

round_date(hour,unit="5 minutes")

[1] "2017-08-28 15:50:00 UTC" "2017-08-28 15:55:00 UTC"
[3] "2017-08-28 12:10:00 UTC" "2017-08-28 15:10:00 UTC"
[5] "2017-08-28 11:50:00 UTC" "2017-08-28 13:35:00 UTC"
[7] "2017-08-28 14:55:00 UTC"