I need to evaluate time intervals in R and then write the intervals in an excel sheet. For evaluating the time intervals I use the lubridate package and for writing data in an excel file I prefer the XLConnect package. The following is a simplified example for the first part:
library(lubridate)
a <- now()
b <- a + hours(2)
i <- interval(a, b)
j <- as.period(i)
j
[1] "2H 0M 0S"
That is exactly what I would like to see in my excel sheet. The following bit writes the data (in this case that is j)
library(XLConnect)
wb <- loadWorkbook("example.xlsx", create = TRUE)
createSheet(wb, name = "time_interval")
writeWorksheet(wb, j, sheet = "time_interval")
saveWorkbook(wb)
However, when you check the excel sheet, you see that the value for j is 7200. That is 2*60*60 seconds. This means it has been converted into seconds. This does not what I want to have. What I would prefer to see is exactly "2H 0M 0S" which is the result R returns and which would be more meaningful for the reader.
Is there a way to achieve that?
If you convert the value to a character string I think it will get you what you want.
a <- now()
b <- a + hours(2)
i <- interval(a, b)
j <- as.period(i)
the structure of j is complex:
str(j)
Formal class 'Period' [package "lubridate"] with 6 slots
..@ .Data : num 0
..@ year : int 0
..@ month : int 0
..@ day : int 0
..@ hour : int 2
..@ minute: int 0
you can simplify by converting to a character string:
j <- as.character(j)
and then save this just as you did in your example above. The result is stored as text in the excel file.