R: Date-Time Classes

DateTimeClasses {base} | R Documentation

## Date-Time Classes

### Description

Description of the classes `"POSIXlt"` and `"POSIXct"` representing calendar dates and times (to the nearest second).

### Usage

    ## S3 method for class 'POSIXct'
    print(x, ...)

    ## S3 method for class 'POSIXct'
    summary(object, digits = 15, ...)

    time + z
    z + time
    time - z
    time1 lop time2

### Arguments

`x, object` | An object to be printed or summarized from one of the date-time classes.
`digits` | Number of significant digits for the computations: should be high enough to represent the least important time unit exactly.
`...` | Further arguments to be passed from or to other methods.
`time` | date-time objects
`time1, time2` | date-time objects or character vectors. (Character vectors are converted by `as.POSIXct`.)
`z` | a numeric vector (in seconds)
`lop` | One of `==`, `!=`, `<`, `<=`, `>` or `>=`.

### Details

There are two basic classes of date/times. Class `"POSIXct"` represents the (signed) number of seconds since the beginning of 1970 (in the UTC timezone) as a numeric vector. Class `"POSIXlt"` is a named list of vectors representing

`sec`

  0–61: seconds

`min`

  0–59: minutes

`hour`

  0–23: hours

`mday`

  1–31: day of the month

`mon`

  0–11: months after the first of the year.

`year`

  years since 1900.

`wday`

  0–6 day of the week, starting on Sunday.

`yday`

  0–365: day of the year.

`isdst`

  Daylight Savings Time flag. Positive if in force, zero if not, negative if unknown.

Note that the internal list structure is somewhat hidden, as many methods, including `print()` or `str`, apply to the abstract date-time vector, as for `"POSIXct"`. The classes correspond to the POSIX/C99 constructs of ‘calendar time’ (the `time_t` data type) and ‘local time’ (or broken-down time, the `struct tm` data type), from which they also inherit their names. The components of `"POSIXlt"` are integer vectors, except `sec`.

`"POSIXct"` is more convenient for including in data frames, and `"POSIXlt"` is closer to human-readable forms. A virtual class `"POSIXt"` exists from which both of the classes inherit: it is used to allow operations such as subtraction to mix the two classes. Note that `length(x)` is the length of the corresponding (abstract) date/time vector, also in the `"POSIXlt"` case.

Components `wday` and `yday` of `"POSIXlt"` are for information, and are not used in the conversion to calendar time. However, `isdst` is needed to distinguish times at the end of DST: typically 1am to 2am occurs twice, first in DST and then in standard time. At all other times `isdst` can be deduced from the first six values, but the behaviour if it is set incorrectly is platform-dependent.

Logical comparisons and limited arithmetic are available for both classes. One can add or subtract a number of seconds from a date-time object, but not add two date-time objects. Subtraction of two date-time objects is equivalent to using `difftime`. Be aware that `"POSIXlt"` objects will be interpreted as being in the current timezone for these operations, unless a timezone has been specified.

`"POSIXlt"` objects will often have an attribute `"tzone"`, a character vector of length 3 giving the timezone name from the TZ environment variable and the names of the base timezone and the alternate (daylight-saving) timezone. Sometimes this may just be of length one, giving the timezone name.

`"POSIXct"` objects may also have an attribute `"tzone"`, a character vector of length one. If set to a non-empty value, it will determine how the object is converted to class `"POSIXlt"` and in particular how it is printed. This is usually desirable, but if you want to specify an object in a particular timezone but to be printed in the current timezone you may want to remove the `"tzone"` attribute (e.g. by `c(x)`).

Unfortunately, the conversion is complicated by the operation of time zones and leap seconds (24 days have been 86401 seconds long so far: the times of the extra seconds are in the object `.leap.seconds`). The details of this are entrusted to the OS services where possible. This always covers the period 1970–2037, and on most machines back to 1902 (when time zones were in their infancy). Outside the platform limits we use our own C code. This uses the offset from GMT in use either for 1902 (when there was no DST) or that predicted for one of 2030 to 2037 (chosen so that the likely DST transition days are Sundays), and uses the alternate (daylight-saving) timezone only if `isdst` is positive or (if `-1`) if DST was predicted to be in operation in the 2030s on that day. (There is no reason to suppose that the DST rules will remain the same in the future, and indeed the US legislated in 2005 to change its rules as from 2007, with a possible future reversion.)

It seems that some rare systems use leap seconds, but most ignore them (as required by POSIX). This is detected and corrected for at build time, so all `"POSIXct"` times used by R do not include leap seconds. (Conceivably this could be wrong if the system has changed since build time, just possibly by changing locales or the ‘zoneinfo’ database.)

Using `c` on `"POSIXlt"` objects converts them to the current time zone, and on `"POSIXct"` objects drops any `"tzone"` attributes (even if they are all marked with the same time zone).

A few times have specific issues. First, the leap seconds are ignored, and real times such as `"2005-12-31 23:59:60"` are (probably) treated as the next second. However, they will never be generated by R, and are unlikely to arise as input. Second, on some OSes there is a problem in the POSIX/C99 standard with `"1969-12-31 23:59:59 UTC"`, which is `-1` in calendar time and that value is on those OSes also used as an error code. Thus `as.POSIXct("1969-12-31 23:59:59", format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", tz = "UTC")` may give `NA`, and hence `as.POSIXct("1969-12-31 23:59:59", tz = "UTC")` will give `"1969-12-31 23:59:00"`. Other OSes (including the code used by R on Windows) report errors separately and so are able to handle that time as valid.

The print methods respect `options("max.print")`.

### Sub-second Accuracy

Classes `"POSIXct"` and `"POSIXlt"` are able to express fractions of a second. (Conversion of fractions between the two forms may not be exact, but will have better than microsecond accuracy.)

Fractional seconds are printed only if `options("digits.secs")` is set: see `strftime`.

### Warning

Some Unix-like systems (especially Linux ones) do not have environment variable TZ set, yet have internal code that expects it (as does POSIX). We have tried to work around this, but if you get unexpected results try setting TZ. See `Sys.timezone` for valid settings.

### References

Ripley, B. D. and Hornik, K. (2001) Date-time classes. R News, 1/2, 8–11. http://www.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2001-2.pdf

### See Also

Dates for dates without times.

`as.POSIXct` and `as.POSIXlt` for conversion between the classes.

`strptime` for conversion to and from character representations.

`Sys.time` for clock time as a `"POSIXct"` object.

`difftime` for time intervals.

`cut.POSIXt`, `seq.POSIXt`, `round.POSIXt` and `trunc.POSIXt` for methods for these classes.

`weekdays` for convenience extraction functions.

### Examples

    (z <- Sys.time())             # the current date, as class "POSIXct"

    Sys.time() - 3600             # an hour ago

    as.POSIXlt(Sys.time(), "GMT") # the current time in GMT
    format(.leap.seconds)         # all 24 leap seconds in your timezone
    print(.leap.seconds, tz="PST8PDT")  # and in Seattle's

    ## look at *internal* representation of "POSIXlt" :
    leapS <- as.POSIXlt(.leap.seconds)
    names(leapS) ; is.list(leapS)
    utils::str(unclass(leapS), vec.len = 7)

[Package base version 2.15.1 Index]