My question comes from this question. The question had the following character string.
x <- "2007-02-01 00:00:00"
y <- "02/01/2007 00:06:10"
If you try to convert this string to date-class object, something funny happens.
This is a sample from @nrusell's answer.
as.POSIXct(x,tz=Sys.timezone())
[1] "2007-02-01 EST"
as.POSIXct(y,format="%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S",tz=Sys.timezone())
[1] "2007-02-01 00:06:10 EST"
As you see, 00:00:00 disappears from the first example. @Richard Scriven left the following example in our discussion using lubridate.
dt <- as.POSIXct("2007-02-01 00:00:00")
hour(dt) <- hour(dt)+1
dt
[1] "2007-02-01 01:00:00 EST"
hour(dt) <- hour(dt)-1
dt
[1] "2007-02-01 EST"
Once again, 00:00:00 disappears. Why does R avoid keeping 00:00:00 in date-class object after conversion? How can we keep 00:00:00?
It is just the print that remove the precision if the time part of a date is a midnight. This is literlay explained in ??strftime help, specially the format parameter:
A character string. The default is "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" if any component has a time component which is not midnight, and "%Y-%m-%d" otherwise
One idea is to redefine the S3 method print for POSIXct object:
print.POSIXct <- function(x,...)print(format(x,"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))
Now for your example if your print your x date(with midnight part) you get:
x <- "2007-02-01 00:00:00"
x <- as.POSIXct(x,tz=Sys.timezone())
x
[1] "2007-02-01 00:00:00"