strptime and non ISO date format

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 01:36:04AM +0200, Petr Pikal wrote:

I have a character vector of dates something like:

timevec<-c("15.5.2003 00:00", "15.5.2003 00:01", "15.5.2003 00:02",
"15.5.2003 00:03","15.5.2003 00:04")

and I would like to transform it to some more convenient date class.
Is there a way how to do it directly without previous reformating to
ISO like structure and adding a seconds to it.

I tried direct transformation but it does not work as I expected (or
as I understood from help pages :-).

strptime(timevec,"%m.%d.%y %H:%M")

[1] NA NA NA NA NA

You have the month and day mixed up, and also asked for two-digit year
when you really have four digits. Correcting both of these does the
trick:

edd at chibud:~> R --silent

timevec<-c("15.5.2003 00:00", "15.5.2003 00:01", "15.5.2003 00:02",

+ "15.5.2003 00:03","15.5.2003 00:04")

strptime(timevec,"%d.%m.%Y %H:%M")

[1] "2003-05-15 00:00:00" "2003-05-15 00:01:00" "2003-05-15 00:02:00"
[4] "2003-05-15 00:03:00" "2003-05-15 00:04:00"

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Don't drink and derive. Alcohol and algebra don't mix.