How to plot a certain range of x values of dates and times? Error "invalid xlim value"

Question

I'm having a problem with plotting time series data if I want to zoom in a certain time frame within the entire x domain (time axis). See the following code for context: ``` date_time <- as.factor(c('8/24/07 17:30','8/24/07 18:00','8/24/07 18:30', '8/24/07 19:00','8/24/07 19:30','8/24/07 20:00', '8/24/07 20:30','8/24/07 21:00','8/24/07 21:30', '8/24/07 22:00','8/24/07 22:30','8/24/07 23:00', '8/24/07 23:30','8/25/07 00:00','8/25/07 00:30')) U. <- as.factor(c('0.2355','0.2602','0.2039','0.2571','0.1419','0.0778','0.3557', '0.3065','0.1559','0.0943','0.1519','0.1498','0.1574','0.1929','0.1407')) dts<-strptime(as.character(date_time),'%m/%d/%y %H:%M') plot(dts,as.numeric(U.),xlim=c('2007-08-24 17:30:00','2007-08-24 19:00:00')) ``` My question: Why doesn't xlim work in this case and how to fix it? Please help. Note: ignore `as.factor` and `as.numeric`, I added these to mimic the actual data once I import it into R

Accepted Answer

You need to tell R that your `xlim` values are dates and times. So try using

```
xlim=c(as.POSIXct('2007-08-24 17:30:00', format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),
                         as.POSIXct('2007-08-24 19:00:00', format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))
```

And on a side note, `as.numeric(U.)` will probably not result in what you actually want. You should use `as.numeric(as.character(U.))` instead - compare the results.

How to plot a certain range of x values of dates and times? Error "invalid xlim value"

Solution

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