error msg using na.approx "x and index must have the same length"

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Below I have written out some simplified data from my dataset. My goal is
to interpolate Price based on timestamp. Therefore the closer a Price is in
time to another price, the more like that price it will be. I want the
interpolations for each St and not across St (St  is a factor with levels
A, B, and C). Unfortunately, I get error messages from code I wrote.

In the end only IDs 10 and 14 will receive interpolated values because all
other NAs occur at the beginning of a level.  My code is given below the
dataset.

ID is int
St is factor with 3 levels
timestamp is POSIXlt
Price is num

Data.frame name is portfolio

ID   St               timestamp                   Price
1     A    2012-01-01 12:50:24.760      NA
2     A    2012-01-01 12:51:25.860   72.09
3     A    2012-01-01 12:52:21.613   72.09
4     A    2012-01-01 12:52:42.010   75.30
5     A    2012-01-01 12:52:42.113   75.30
6     B    2012-01-01 12:56:20.893       NA
7     B    2012-01-01 12:56:46.023    67.70
8     B    2012-01-01 12:57:19.300    76.06
9     B    2012-01-01 12:58:20.750    77.85
10   B    2012-01-01 12:58:20.797      NA
11   B    2012-01-01 12:59:19.527    79.57
12   C    2012-01-01 13:00:21.847    81.53
13   C    2012-01-01 13:00:21.860    81.53
14   C    2012-01-01 13:00:21.873       NA
15   C    2012-01-01 13:00:43.493    84.69
16   D    2012-01-01 12:01:21.520    24.63
17   D    2012-01-01 12:02:18.880    21.13

I tried the following using na.approx from zoo package

interpolatedPrice<-unlist(tapply(portfolio$Price, portfolio$St, na.approx,
portfolio$timestamp, na.rm=FALSE))
Your problem is that this splits portfolio$Price by St but not
timestamp, so the number of timestamps passed to na.approx() doesn't
align with the Price series. I think you want something more like
this:

lapply(split(portfolio[,-1], portfolio$St), function(x)
zoo(na.approx(x[,2], x[,1]), x[,1]))

which is admittedly opaque.

I think an easier data management strategy for you might be to put
your data in a list of zoo/xts series and use lapply generously.

E.g.,

pp <- lapply(split(portfolio[,-1], portfolio$St), as.zoo)

and then do your calculations with generous use of lapply()

Cheers,
Michael
but keep getting error
"Error in na.approx.default(X[[1L]], ...) :
  x and index must have the same length"

I checked the length of every variable in the formula and they all have the
same length so I am not sure why I get the error message.

Jay

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