How to make an empty vector of POSIXct

Question

I want to make an empty vector of POSIXct so that I can put a POSIXct in it:

vec <- vector(\"POSIXct\", 10)
vec
vec[1] <- \"2014-         


        

Answer 1

I use the following function for this. Very similar to the other solutions.

vector_datetime <- function(n = 0L) structure(rep(NA_integer_, n), class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt"))

So you can do things like this.

> vector_datetime()
POSIXct of length 0

> vector_datetime(10)
 [1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

> class(vector_datetime(10))
[1] "POSIXct" "POSIXt" 

This can also be done with lubridate.

library(lubridate)

> as_datetime(integer(0))
POSIXct of length 0