CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rtimestampmilliseconds
jmccucc
jmccucc

Reputation: 33

Adding milliseconds to a timestamp in R, even though the original character does not have milliseconds?

I am doing some animal movement analysis and I want to submit data to an organisation called Movebank for annotation, but they require the timestamp to have milliseconds included with 3 decimal places.

I have a column in my data frame (dat) with my timestamps as characters (without milliseconds), for example "2017-07-19 16:30:24"

To convert them to time and date format with milliseconds I am using the code:

options(digits.secs = 3)
dat$timestamp <- as.POSIXct(dat$timestamp, format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS", tz = "UTC")

Which works fine at converting my timestamp column to POSIXct which I can use to make tracks etc., but it does not add .000 milliseconds to the end of each timestamp which I was hoping it would.

I have also tried:

dat$timestamp <- as.POSIXct(dat$timestamp, format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS3", tz = "UTC")

(Note: I added .. %OS3 ...) But this returns an NA for my for my timestamps.

Can anybody shed some light on this? I essentially need to add .000 to the end of each of my timestamps so that, using the example given above, I would have the format "2017-07-19 16:30:24.000"

Upvotes: 3

Views: 914

Answers (1)

jay.sf
jay.sf

Reputation: 72623

The milliseconds will be dropped if there are no times with effective milliseconds.

options(digits.secs=4)

x1 <- as.POSIXct("2017-07-19 16:30:25")
as.POSIXct(paste0(x1, ".000"), format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS")
# [1] "2017-07-19 16:30:25 UTC"

However, they will be added automatically if there are.

x2 <- as.POSIXct("2017-07-19 16:30:25.002")
c(x1, x2)
# [1] "2017-07-19 18:30:25.000 CEST" "2017-07-19 18:30:25.002 CEST"

Upvotes: 3

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