Convert Twitter Timestamp in R

Question

I am new to R and am terrible with handling dates. The following date is returned from a query to the Twitter search API and is stored as a character string in a my dataframe.<

Answer 1

I strongly recommend that you take a look at Jeff Gentry's twitteR package on CRAN. Among other niceties, it parses date strings for you:

> library(twitteR)
> tweets = searchTwitter('#rstats')
> length(tweets)
[1] 25
> tweet = tweets[[1]]
> str(tweet)
Formal class 'status' [package "twitteR"] with 10 slots
  ..@ text        : chr "The Joy of Sweave \023 A Beginner\031s Guide to Reproducible Research with Sweave: Just& http://goo.gl/fb/APmCb #rstats"
  ..@ favorited   : logi FALSE
  ..@ replyToSN   : chr(0) 
  ..@ created     : POSIXct[1:1], format: "2011-01-18 04:48:05"
  ..@ truncated   : logi FALSE
  ..@ replyToSID  : num(0) 
  ..@ id          : num 2.72e+16
  ..@ replyToUID  : num(0) 
  ..@ statusSource: chr "<a href="http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164577" rel="nofollow">"| __truncated__
  ..@ screenName  : chr "Rbloggers"