Converting characters back to Date and Time

On Tue, 31 Aug 2021, Eliza Botto writes:

DeaR useR,

I read an excel column in R having Date and time (written in the same cell) as follow,

06/18/18 10:00

06/18/18 11:00

06/18/18 12:00

In R environment, they are read as

43269.42

43269.46

43269.50

Is there a way to covert these characters back to the original format?

Thank-you very much in advance.


Eliza Botto

If using a package is an option:

  library("datetimeutils")
  convert_date(c(43269.42, 43269.46, 43269.50), "excel")
  ## [1] "2018-06-18" "2018-06-18" "2018-06-18"

  convert_date(c(43269.42, 43269.46, 43269.50), "excel", fraction = TRUE)
  ## [1] "2018-06-18 10:04:48 CEST" "2018-06-18 11:02:24 CEST"
  ## [3] "2018-06-18 12:00:00 CEST"

Note that the times differ: the numbers are probably
not /displayed/ to full precision in R.

You may also want to search the archives of this list,
as this question has been discussed before.

Enrico Schumann (maintainer of package datetimeutils)
Lucerne, Switzerland
http://enricoschumann.net