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I'm currently playing around a lot with dates and times for a package I'm building.
Stumbling across this post reminded me again that it's generally not a bad idea to check out if something can be done with basic R features before turning to contrib packages.
Thus, is it possible to round a date of class POSIXct with base R functionality?
I checked
methods(round)
which "only" gave me
[1] round.Date round.timeDate*
Non-visible functions are asterisked
This is what I'd like to do (Pseudo Code)
x <- as.POSIXct(Sys.time())
[1] "2012-07-04 10:33:55 CEST"
round(x, atom="minute")
[1] "2012-07-04 10:34:00 CEST"
round(x, atom="hour")
[1] "2012-07-04 11:00:00 CEST"
round(x, atom="day")
[1] "2012-07-04 CEST"
I know this can be done with timeDate, lubridate etc., but I'd like to keep package dependencies down. So before going ahead and checking out the source code of the respective packages, I thought I'd ask if someone has already done something like this.
330
POSIXct stores date and time in seconds with the number of seconds beginning at 1 January 1970. Negative numbers are used to store dates prior to 1970. Thus, the POSIXct format stores each date and time a single value in units of seconds. Storing the data this way, optimizes use in data.
To get the year from a date in R you can use the functions as. POSIXct() and format() . For example, here's how to extract the year from a date: 1) date <- as. POSIXct("02/03/2014 10:41:00", format = "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S) , and 2) format(date, format="%Y") .
There are two POSIX date/time classes, which differ in the way that the values are stored internally. The POSIXct class stores date/time values as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, while the POSIXlt class stores them as a list with elements for second, minute, hour, day, month, and year, among others.
A virtual class "POSIXt" exists from which both of the classes inherit: it is used to allow operations such as subtraction to mix the two classes. Components wday and yday of "POSIXlt" are for information, and are not used in the conversion to calendar time.
base has round.POSIXt to do this. Not sure why it doesn't come up with methods.
x <- as.POSIXct(Sys.time())
x
[1] "2012-07-04 10:01:08 BST"
round(x,"mins")
[1] "2012-07-04 10:01:00 BST"
round(x,"hours")
[1] "2012-07-04 10:00:00 BST"
round(x,"days")
[1] "2012-07-04"
On this theme with lubridate, also look into the ceiling_date() and floor_date() functions:
x <- as.POSIXct("2009-08-03 12:01:59.23")
ceiling_date(x, "second")
# "2009-08-03 12:02:00 CDT"
ceiling_date(x, "hour")
# "2009-08-03 13:00:00 CDT"
ceiling_date(x, "day")
# "2009-08-04 CDT"
ceiling_date(x, "week")
# "2009-08-09 CDT"
ceiling_date(x, "month")
# "2009-09-01 CDT"
If you don't want to call external libraries and want to keep POSIXct as I do this is one idea (inspired by this question): use strptime and paste a fake month and day. It should be possible to do it more straight forward, as said in this comment
"For strptime the input string need not specify the date completely: it is assumed that unspecified seconds, minutes or hours are zero, and an unspecified year, month or day is the current one."
Thus it seems that you have to use strftime to output a truncated string, paste the missing part and convert again in POSIXct.
This is how an update answer could look:
x <- as.POSIXct(Sys.time())
x
[1] "2018-12-27 10:58:51 CET"
round(x,"mins")
[1] "2018-12-27 10:59:00 CET"
round(x,"hours")
[1] "2018-12-27 11:00:00 CET"
round(x,"days")
[1] "2018-12-27 CET"
as.POSIXct(paste0(strftime(x,format="%Y-%m"),"-01")) #trunc by month
[1] "2018-12-01 CET"
as.POSIXct(paste0(strftime(x,format="%Y"),"-01-01")) #trunc by year
[1] "2018-01-01 CET"
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