reformatting datetime in R-CodePudding

I have data "A" in the format chr "5/7/2021 15:15". I would like to convert it to a format which R will recognize. (It is giving me errors when I try to plot, for instance, which leads me to believe it needs to be reformatted.)

Here is the format "B" I would like to achieve. R seems to like this ok, so I might as well match it (?):

POSIXct, format: "2021-8-11 16:00:00". I am not sure if the seconds are needed, and they do not exist in data "A" so the seconds could be omitted. If R doesn't care then I don't either. The timezone is UTC.

How do I do it? I have tried a couple things, including:

CTD_datetime_UTC <- as.POSIXct(CTD$Date.and.Time, tz = "UTC").

But I am new to working with datetime in R. any help appreciated, thank you.

CodePudding user response：

You can use strptime from base R. But there are many parsers for dates...

Assuming the format is "day/month/year" (example is not unambiguous, could also be "month/day/year")

strptime("5/7/2021 15:15", "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M", tz = "UTC")

Returns:

[1] "2021-07-05 15:15:00 UTC"

CodePudding user response：

Using parsedate

library(parsedate)
parse_date("5/7/2021 15:15")
[1] "2021-05-07 15:15:00 UTC"