CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rna
Fiona
Fiona

Reputation: 477

Change NA to blank in date time in R

This might be a simple question but I have tried a few things and they're not working. I have a large data frame with date/time formats in. An example of my data frame is:

  Index       FixTime1                  FixTime2
    1     2017-05-06 10:11:03               NA
    2            NA              2017-05-07 11:03:03

I want to remove all NAs from the dataframe and make them "" (blank). I have tried:

df[is.na(df)]<-""

but this gives the error:

Error in as.POSIXlt.character(value) : 
character string is not in a standard unambiguous format

Again, this is probably very simple to fix but can't find how to do this, while keeping each of these columns in time/date format

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2375

Answers (2)

Terru_theTerror
Terru_theTerror

Reputation: 5017

Here a possible solution on a toy dataset, adapt this code to your needs:

df<-data.frame(date=c("01/01/2017",NA,"01/02/2017"))
df
        date
1 01/01/2017
2       <NA>
3 01/02/2017

From factor to character, and then remove NA

 df$date <- as.character(df$date)
 df[is.na(df$date),]<-""
 df
            date
    1 01/01/2017
    2           
    3 01/02/2017

In your specific example, this could be fine:

df_2<-data.frame(Index=c(1,2),
+                FixTime1=c("2017-05-06 10:11:03",NA),
+                FixTime2=c(NA,"2017-05-07 11:03:03"))


df_2<-data.frame(lapply(df_2, as.character), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

df_2[is.na(df_2$FixTime1),"FixTime1"]<-"" 
df_2[is.na(df_2$FixTime2),"FixTime2"]<-""
df_2
  Index            FixTime1            FixTime2
1     1 2017-05-06 10:11:03                    
2     2                     2017-05-07 11:03:03

Upvotes: 1

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887531

We can use replace

df[] <- replace(as.matrix(df), is.na(df), "")
df
#   Index            FixTime1            FixTime2
#1     1 2017-05-06 10:11:03                    
#2     2                     2017-05-07 11:03:03

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions