CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgsub
mikemtnbikes
mikemtnbikes

Reputation: 572

Unexpected dropping of end of string with gsub()

I'm confused by the following behavior.

> tmpString <- Sys.time()
> tmpString
[1] "2021-06-17 11:50:52 EDT"
> gsub(" ",  "_", tmpString)
[1] "2021-06-17_11:50:52"
> gsub(" ",  "_", tmpString, fixed=TRUE)
[1] "2021-06-17_11:50:52"

Why is the " EDT" at the end of tmpString being lost?

For completeness,

> R.version
               _                           
platform       x86_64-pc-linux-gnu         
arch           x86_64                      
os             linux-gnu                   
system         x86_64, linux-gnu           
status                                     
major          3                           
minor          6.3                         
year           2020                        
month          02                          
day            29                          
svn rev        77875                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
nickname       Holding the Windsock        
>

Upvotes: 1

Views: 93

Answers (1)

G. Grothendieck
G. Grothendieck

Reputation: 269481

tmpString is not a string. As mentioned in the comments it is a POSIXct object which internally is the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch and it is the print function which shows it with a time zone. Better to call it tmp instead of tmpString and then explicitly use format to convert it to a string. (Below we used sub to replace the first space but use gsub as in the question if you want both spaces replaced.)

tmp <- Sys.time()
sub(" ", "_", format(tmp, usetz = TRUE))
## [1] "2021-06-17_12:39:51 EDT"

Also note the existence of format_ISO8601 which you might prefer:

format_ISO8601(tmp, usetz = TRUE)
## [1] "2021-06-17T12:39:51-0400"

Upvotes: 1

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