Converting chr “00:00:00” to date-time “00:00:00”

Question

My question comes from this question. The question had the following character string.

x <- \"2007-02-01 00:00:00\"
y <- \"02/01/2007 00:06:10\"
         


        

Answer 1

It is just the print that remove the precision if the time part of a date is a midnight. This is literlay explained in ??strftime help, specially the format parameter:

A character string. The default is "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" if any component has a time component which is not midnight, and "%Y-%m-%d" otherwise

One idea is to redefine the S3 method print for POSIXct object:

print.POSIXct <- function(x,...)print(format(x,"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

Now for your example if your print your x date(with midnight part) you get:

x <- "2007-02-01 00:00:00"
x <- as.POSIXct(x,tz=Sys.timezone())
x
[1] "2007-02-01 00:00:00"