how to convert factor into DateTime in R?

Question

This question might be simple for some of you but bear with me since I\'m a beginner in R.

I have a dataframe that has a factor column (called time) containing DateTime

Answer 1

Try:

dataframe1$datetime <- strptime(x = as.character(dataframe1$datetime),
                                format = "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")

Answer 2

Probably the easiest thing to do is use the lubridate packages which has a large number of functions for date manipulation. The following will convert your time into a POSIXct object:

 library(lubridate)
 mdy_hm( as.character(dataframe1$time) )

See ?mdy to see the variety of date parsing functions.

For a slightly more verbose version that does not rely on lubridate

strptime(x = as.character( dataframe1$datetime ), format = "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")