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How to seperate date and time into different columns?

4 messages · FMH, Brian G. Peterson, Gabor Grothendieck +1 more

FMH
#
Dear All,

I have a series of data in which the first column consist of a combination of date and time, for instance 17 April 2008 at 4.01pm, such data is recorded as:

4/17/2008 16:01 

I'd like to seperate it into four different columns which consist of Day, Month,Year and Time, respectively.

Could someone please advice me on this mater?

Thank you,
Fir
#
FMH wrote:
Use xts.

Specify a POSIXlt index

All of the properties will be available in POSIXlt.

However, you didn't state what you wish to accomplish.  It is likely 
that xts will be able to subset anything you need without splitting 
things up.

Realize that using a real time series class will always perform better 
than using a data frame.

Cross-posting is considered rude. If you need more help than the above, 
please make your query specific to some problem in finance, to keep the 
list focused on its topic (finance), or only reply to r-help.

It would be polite to sign your name too...

Regards,

    - Brian
#
Normally one wants to store time indexes as a single column so its
likely that this is not what you really want to do.  You may wish to
explain what your final objective is and why you want to do this.

However, if you must there are many ways and here is one  The first
two lines load chron and set up some input data.  Now that we have
some input the first line of the solution creates a chron object by
passing to chron the portion prior to the space and the portion after
the space and appending :00 to the latter.  The second line uses
month.day.year to get the date components and subtraction of the date
to get the times.
year month day     time
1 2008     4  17 16:01:00
2 2008     4  18 20:01:00

R News 4/1 has an relevant article.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:09 PM, FMH <kagba2006 at yahoo.com> wrote:
#
A note about xts:

The time class layer is abstracted from the implementation. This  
allows for some very time specific manipulation without having to  
manage the underlying details.

Take a look at the xts docs and vignette.

Also, the functions .indexmon .indexyear etc correspond to the POSIXlt  
components. The xts object doesn't use this as a class, but this  
allows you access as if it did.

HTH
Jeff

Jeffrey A. Ryan
jeffrey.ryan at insightalgo.com

ia: insight algorithmics
www.insightalgo.com

On Jan 22, 2010, at 12:18 PM, "Brian G. Peterson"
<brian at braverock.com> wrote: