R extract time components from semi-standard strings

Question

Setup

I have a column of durations stored as a strings in a dataframe. I want to convert them to an appropriate time object, probably POSIXlt. Most of the strings

Answer 1

difftime objects are time duration objects that can be added to either POSIXct or POSIXlt objects. Maybe you want to use this instead of POSIXlt?

Regarding the conversion from strings to time objects, you could do something like this:

data <- data.frame(time.string = c(
    "1 d 1 h",
    "30 m 10 s",
    "1 d 2 h 3 m 4 s",
    "2 h 3 m 4 s",
    "10 d 20 h 30 m 40 s",
    "--"))

f <- function(x) {
    x <- as.character(x)
    format <- paste(c(if (grepl('d', x)) '%j d',
                      if (grepl('h', x)) '%H h',
                      if (grepl('m', x)) '%M m',
                      if (grepl('s', x)) '%S s'), collapse=' ')

    if (nchar(format) > 0) {
        if (grepl('%j d', format)) {
            # '%j 1' is day 0. We add a day so that x = '1 d' means 24hrs.
            difftime(as.POSIXct(x, format=format) + as.difftime(1, units='days'), 
                    cut(Sys.Date(), breaks='years'),
                    units='hours')
        } else {
            as.difftime(x, format, units='hours')
        }
    } else { NA }
}

data$time.span <- sapply(data$time.string, FUN=f)