as.Date(as.POSIXct()) gives the wrong date?

Question

I\'d been trying to look through a dataframe extracting all rows where the date component of a POSIXct column matched a certain value.I came across the following which is co

Answer 1

The safe way to do this is to pass the date value through format. This does create an additional step but as.Date will accept the character result if it is formated with a "-" or "/":

as.Date( format( as.POSIXct('2019-03-11 23:59:59'), "%Y-%m-%d") )
[1] "2019-03-11"

as.Date(  as.POSIXct('2019-03-11 23:59:59') ) # I'm in a locale where the problem might exist
[1] "2019-03-12"

The documentation for timezones is confusing to me too. In some (and this case as it turned out) case EST may not be unambiguous and may actually refer to a tz in Australia. Try "EST5EDT" or "America/New_York" if you happen to be in North America.

In this case it could also relate to differences in how your unstated OS handles the 'tz' argument, since I get "2012-08-06". ( I'm in PDT US tz at the moment, although I'm not sure that should matter. )Changing which function gets the tz argument may clarify (or not):

> as.Date(as.POSIXct('2012-08-06 19:35:23', tz='EST'))
[1] "2012-08-07"
> as.Date(as.POSIXct('2012-08-06 17:35:23', tz='EST'))
[1] "2012-08-06"


> as.Date(as.POSIXct('2012-08-06 21:35:23'), tz='EST')
[1] "2012-08-06"
> as.Date(as.POSIXct('2012-08-06 22:35:23'), tz='EST')
[1] "2012-08-07"

If you omit the tz from as.POSIXct then UTC is assumed.

These are the unambiguous names of the Ozzie TZ's (at least on my Mac):

tzfile <- "/usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab"
tzones <- read.delim(tzfile, row.names = NULL, header = FALSE,
    col.names = c("country", "coords", "name", "comments"),
    as.is = TRUE, fill = TRUE, comment.char = "#")
grep("^Aus", tzones$name, value=TRUE)
 [1] "Australia/Lord_Howe"   "Australia/Hobart"     
 [3] "Australia/Currie"      "Australia/Melbourne"  
 [5] "Australia/Sydney"      "Australia/Broken_Hill"
 [7] "Australia/Brisbane"    "Australia/Lindeman"   
 [9] "Australia/Adelaide"    "Australia/Darwin"     
[11] "Australia/Perth"       "Australia/Eucla"