CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdatedatetimetime
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Display Name is missing

Reputation: 135

Adding/subtracting date-time columns in data-frames

I have a data frame with two text columns which are essentially time-stamps columns namely BEFORE and AFTER and the format is 12/29/2016 4:29:00 PM. I want to compare if the gap between the BEFORE and AFTER time for each row is more than 5 minutes or not. Which package in R will allow subtraction between time stamp?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 57

Answers (1)

agstudy
agstudy

Reputation: 121618

No need for extra packages, using base R you can achieve the date time comparison.

First coerce your character to a valid date time structure. Here I am using POSIXct: 

d1= as.POSIXct("12/29/2016 4:29:00 PM",format="%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")
d2= as.POSIXct("12/30/2016 5:29:00 PM",format="%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")

Then to get the difference in minutes you can use difftime: 

difftime(d1,d2,units="mins")

Note the all those functions are vectorized So the same code will work with vectors.

manage PM/AM

to take care of PM/AM we should add %p to the format that should be used in conjonction with %I not %H: 

d1= as.POSIXct("12/28/2016 11:53:00 AM",
         format="%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p")
d2= as.POSIXct("12/28/2016 12:03:00 PM",
         format="%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p")

difftime(d2,d1,units="mins")
## Time difference of 10 mins

for more help about date/time format you can read ?strptime.

Upvotes: 1

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