Chapter 6. Converting and Defining Time Variables

This chapter provides a broad overview of the ways to convert and store time variables. This is a mundane topic, but it is common to have data that contains date and time information in a wide variety of forms. There are roughly three parts in this chapter:

• Converting strings to time data types: This section gives you an introduction to the methods available to take a time stamp in text format and convert it into one of R's internal time formats
• Converting time data types to strings: This section gives you an introduction to the methods available to take a time data type and convert it to a string so that it can be saved to a file in a standard format
• Operations on time data types: This section gives you an overview of the methods and techniques used to perform basic arithmetic on time data types