Reading and converting time data via read.table

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.

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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