In R, use lubridate to convert hms objects into seconds

Question

simple question in lubridate--I want to convert an hms object into its appropriate number of seconds since the start of the day.

For instance

library(lub         


        

Answer 1

It doesn't matter which package you use -- it will have convert a date / datetime object into a POSIXct representation of seconds since the epoch. So you may as well do it in base R -- so here deploy ISOdatetime() with an arbitrary day, using today:

R> difftime(ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,12,34,45), ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,0,0,0))
Time difference of 12.5792 hours

So we want seconds:

R> difftime(ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,12,34,45), ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,0,0,0), 
+          unit="secs")
Time difference of 45285 secs

And we can cast to numbers:

R> as.numeric(difftime(ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,12,34,45), +
                       ISOdatetime(2012,7,2,0,0,0), unit="secs"))
[1] 45285

Edit: And getting back to lubridate, this is arguably a bug:

> hms("12:34:45") - hms("00:00:00")
[1] 12 hours, 34 minutes and 45 seconds
R> as.numeric(hms("12:34:45") - hms("00:00:00"))
[1] 45
R>