How to calculate time difference in R using an dataframe-CodePudding

Have an large data frame where there's 2 columns (POSIXct) and need to calculate length of ride.

Dates are formatted as follows:

format: "2020-10-31 19:39:43"

Can use the difftime function, correct?

Thanks

CodePudding user response：

Given your data is using the correct POSIXct format you can simply subtract two dates to get the difference. No need for additional functions.

date1 <- as.POSIXct(strptime("2020-10-31 19:39:43", format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS"))
date2 <- as.POSIXct(strptime("2020-10-31 19:20:43", format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS"))

date1 - date2

Output: Time difference of 19 mins

CodePudding user response：

It depends what output format you want.
For example if you want month difference between two dates, you can use the "interval" function from library "lubridate"

library(lubridate)
interval(as.Date(df$date1),as.Date(df$date2) %/% months(1))

It also works with years, weeks, days, hours