Why lubridate?

Working with Dates and Times in R

Charlotte Wickham

Instructor

lubridate

Make working with dates and times in R easy!
tidyverse package
- Plays nicely with builtin datetime objects
- Designed for humans not computers
Plays nicely with other tidyverse packages
Consistent behaviour regardless of underlying object

Parsing a wide range of formats

ymd("2013-02-27")

"2013-02-27"

dmy("27/2/13")

"2013-02-27"

parse_date_time(c("Feb 27th, 2017", "27th Feb 2017"), 
+   order = c("mdy", "dmy"))

"2017-02-27 UTC" "2017-02-27 UTC"

Manipulating datetimes

# Extract components
akl_daily <- akl_daily %>%
  mutate(
    year = year(date),
    yday = yday(date),
    month = month(date, label = TRUE)
  )

Time spans

# A tibble: 131 x 3
            name              period 
           <chr>        <S4: Period> 
1  Elizabeth II 65y 7m 27d 0H 0M 0S 
2      Victoria  63y 7m 2d 0H 0M 0S 
3      George V 25y 8m 14d 0H 0M 0S 
4    George III 19y 0m 28d 0H 0M 0S 
5     George VI 15y 1m 26d 0H 0M 0S

Other lubridate features

Handling timezones
Fast parsing of standard formats
Outputting datetimes

Let's practice!

Working with Dates and Times in R