converting numbers to time

Question

I entered my data by hand, and to save time I didn\'t include any punctuation in my times. So, for example, 8:32am I entered as 832. 3:34pm I entered as 1534. I\'m trying to

Answer 1

Say

x  <-  c('834', '1534')

The last two characters represent minutes, so you can extract them using

mins  <-  substr(x, nchar(x)-1, nchar(x))

Similarly, extract hours with

hour  <-  substr(x, 0, nchar(x)-2)

Then create a fixed vector of time values with

time  <-  paste0(hour, ':', mins)

I think you are forced to specify dates in the chron package, so assuming a date value, you can converto chron with this:

chron(dates.=rep('02/02/02', 2), 
      times.=paste0(hour, ':', mins, ':00'), 
      format=c(dates='m/d/y',times='h:m:s'))