Subset dataframe based on POSIXct date and time greater than datetime using dplyr

Question

I am not sure what is going wrong with selecting date times as a POSIXct format. I have read several comments on subsetting a dataframe based on as.Date and I can get that to work without an issue. I have also read many posts suggesting that filtering POSIXct formats should work, but for some reason I cannot get it to work.

An example dataframe:

library(lubridate)
library(dplyr)

date_test <- seq(ymd_hms('2016-07-01 00:00:00'),ymd_hms('2016-08-01 00:00:00'), by = '15 min')
date_test <- data.frame(date_test)
date_test$datetime <- date_test$date_test
date_test <- select(date_test, -date_test)

I checked that it is in POSIXct format and then tried several ways to subset the dataframe greater than 2016-07-01 01:15:00. However the output never shows the date times less than 2016-07-01 01:15:00 being removed. I am sorry if this has been asked somewhere and I cannot find it but I have looked and tried to get this to work. I am using UTC as the timezone to avoid daylight savings time issues so that is not the issue here - unless the filter requires it.

class(date_test$datetime)

date_test <- date_test %>% filter(datetime > '2016-07-01 01:15:00')

date_test <- date_test %>% 
  filter(datetime > as.POSIXct("2016-07-01 00:15"))

date_test <- subset(date_test, datetime > as.POSIXct('2016-07-01 01:15:00')) 

Now if I filter using:

date_test <- date_test %>% 
  filter(datetime > as.POSIXct("2016-07-10 01:15:00"))

the output is very strange with a day behind and the wrong time?

2016-07-09 13:30:00
2016-07-09 13:45:00
2016-07-09 14:00:00
2016-07-09 14:15:00
2016-07-09 14:30:00

If it helps I am using MAC OS Sierra with R Studio Version 1.0.143 and R You Stupid Darkness, DPLYR 0.5 and Lubridate 1.6

Answer 1

ymd_hms uses POSIXct times in "UTC" timezone by default - as.POSIXct uses the system timezone (e.g. - Australia for me) - you need to consistently use ymd_hms or change to the "UTC" timezone as per Dave's suggestion in the comments.

E.g.: these examples work:

date_test <- seq(ymd_hms('2016-07-01 00:30:00'),ymd_hms('2016-07-01 01:30:00'), by = '15 min')
date_test <- data.frame(datetime=date_test)
date_test

#             datetime
#1 2016-07-01 00:30:00
#2 2016-07-01 00:45:00
#3 2016-07-01 01:00:00
#4 2016-07-01 01:15:00
#5 2016-07-01 01:30:00

date_test %>% 
  filter(datetime > as.POSIXct("2016-07-01 01:00:00", tz="UTC"))

date_test %>% 
  filter(datetime > ymd_hms("2016-07-01 01:00:00"))

#             datetime
#1 2016-07-01 01:15:00
#2 2016-07-01 01:30:00