Extracting time from POSIXct

Question

How would I extract the time from a series of POSIXct objects discarding the date part?

For instance, I have:

times <- structure(c(1331086009.5009         


        

Answer 1

The time_t value for midnight GMT is always divisible by 86400 (24 * 3600). The value for seconds-since-midnight GMT is thus time %% 86400.

The hour in GMT is (time %% 86400) / 3600 and this can be used as the x-axis of the plot:

plot((as.numeric(times) %% 86400)/3600, val)

To adjust for a time zone, adjust the time before taking the modulus, by adding the number of seconds that your time zone is ahead of GMT. For example, US central daylight saving time (CDT) is 5 hours behind GMT. To plot against the time in CDT, the following expression is used:

plot(((as.numeric(times) - 5*3600) %% 86400)/3600, val)