Speedup conversion of 2 million rows of date strings to POSIX.ct

Question

I have a csv which includes about 2 million rows of date strings in the format:

2012/11/13 21:10:00 

Lets call that csv$Date.and.Time

Answer 1

Try using lubridate - it does all date time parsing using regular expressions, so not only is it much faster, it's also much more flexible.