Colon in date format between seconds and milliseconds. How to parse in R?

datetime, milliseconds, r, strptime, time-series

Solution

There's a subtle distinction here that may be throwing you off. As `?strptime` notes:

for 'strptime' '%OS' will input seconds including fractional seconds.

To emphasize that a bit, `%OS` represents the seconds including fractional seconds --- not just the fractional part of the seconds: if the seconds value is 44.234, `%OS` or `%OS3` represents 44.234, not .234

So the solution is indeed to substitute a `.` for that final `:`.

Here's one way you might do that:

x <- "2012.01.15 09:00:02:002"
strptime(gsub(":", ".", x), "%Y.%m.%d %H.%M.%OS") 

Problem

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