Date & Time in R - Introduction - Rsquared Academy Blog

In this new series Handling Date & Time in R, we will learn to handle date & time in R. We will start off by learning how to get current date & time before moving on to understand how R handles date/time internally and the different classes such as Date & POSIXct/lt. We will spend some time exploring time zones, daylight savings and ISO 8001 standard for representing date/time. We will look at all the weird formats in which date/time come in real world and learn to parse them using conversion specifications. After this, we will also learn how to handle date/time columns while reading external data into R. We will learn to extract and update different date/time components such as year, month, day, hour, minute etc., create sequence of dates in different ways and explore intervals, durations and period. We will end the tutorial by learning how to round/rollback dates. Throughout the series, we will also work through a case study to better understand the concepts we learn. Happy learning!

Resources

Below are the links to all the resources related to this tutorial:

Introduction

Date

Let us begin by looking at the current date and time. Sys.Date() and today() will return the current date.

Sys.Date()

## [1] "2021-02-03"

lubridate::today()

## [1] "2021-02-03"

Time

Sys.time() and now() return the date, time and the timezone. In now(), we can specify the timezone using the tzone argument.

Sys.time()

## [1] "2021-02-03 18:54:23 IST"

lubridate::now()

## [1] "2021-02-03 18:54:23 IST"

lubridate::now(tzone = "UTC")

## [1] "2021-02-03 13:24:23 UTC"

AM or PM?

am() and pm() allow us to check whether date/time occur in the AM or PM? They return a logical value i.e. TRUE or FALSE

lubridate::am(now())

## [1] FALSE

lubridate::pm(now())

## [1] TRUE

Leap Year

We can also check if the current year is a leap year using leap_year().

Sys.Date()

## [1] "2021-02-03"

lubridate::leap_year(Sys.Date())

## [1] FALSE

Summary

Function	Description
`Sys.Date()`	Current Date
`lubridate::today()`	Current Date
`Sys.time()`	Current Time
`lubridate::now()`	Current Time
`lubridate::am()`	Whether time occurs in am?
`lubridate::pm()`	Whether time occurs in pm?
`lubridate::leap_year()`	Check if the year is a leap year?

Your Turn

get current date
get current time
check whether the time occurs in am or pm?
check whether the following years were leap years
- 2018
- 2016

Case Study

Throughout the tutorial, we will work on a case study related to transactions of an imaginary trading company. The data set includes information about invoice and payment dates.

Data

transact <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rsquaredacademy/datasets/master/transact.csv')

## # A tibble: 2,466 x 3
##    Invoice    Due        Payment   
##    <date>     <date>     <date>    
##  1 2013-01-02 2013-02-01 2013-01-15
##  2 2013-01-26 2013-02-25 2013-03-03
##  3 2013-07-03 2013-08-02 2013-07-08
##  4 2013-02-10 2013-03-12 2013-03-17
##  5 2012-10-25 2012-11-24 2012-11-28
##  6 2012-01-27 2012-02-26 2012-02-22
##  7 2013-08-13 2013-09-12 2013-09-09
##  8 2012-12-16 2013-01-15 2013-01-12
##  9 2012-05-14 2012-06-13 2012-07-01
## 10 2013-07-01 2013-07-31 2013-07-26
## # ... with 2,456 more rows

We will explore more about reading data sets with date/time columns after learning how to parse date/time. We have shared the code for reading the data sets used in the practice questions both in the Learning Management System as well as in our GitHub repo.

Data Dictionary

The data set has 3 columns. All the dates are in the format (yyyy-mm-dd).

Column	Description
Invoice	Invoice Date
Due	Due Date
Payment	Payment Date

In the case study, we will try to answer a few questions we have about the transact data.

extract date, month and year from Due
compute the number of days to settle invoice
compute days over due
check if due year is a leap year
check when due day in february is 29, whether it is a leap year
how many invoices were settled within due date
how many invoices are due in each quarter

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