How to convert a formatted local time to epoch?

Question

I have a local time like \"2013-08-27 10:01:22\", how do I convert it to epoch time?

basically I need the opposite of as.POSIXct, I searched on

Answer 1

The accepted answer truncates time to the whole second. POSIXct actually provides sub-second resolution, though. As mentioned in the comments by “statquant”, you can use as.numeric to obtain the exact epoch:

result = as.numeric(as.POSIXct(Sys.time()))

Beware that with the default options for digit display in R this will look like it has no digits behind the decimal point:

> result
[1] 1480599768

However, these are simply truncated in the display. To make them visible, use:

> dput(result)
1480599767.58447

… or set options('digits') to a higher value.