generating a column of times

I’m attempting to create a column of just times in my dataset. I’ve generated a column of random dates from 2018-2020 but the time stamps don’t seem to be generating randomly throughout the day as I’d like.

I did this to create the date/time column

data$date <- sample(seq(as.POSIXct('2018/01/01'), as.POSIXct('2020/12/31'), by = "day"),
                    length(data$date), replace = TRUE)

and am using this to pull the times

data$time <- format(data$date, format = "%H:%M:%S")

but this is what it looks like

> dput(data[1:10,-c(5,6)])
structure(list(order_num = c(501073L, 969942L, 1091101L, 590143L, 
390404L, 219429L, 1025827L, 689629L, 694348L, 435848L), date = structure(c(1542344400, 
1552194000, 1550379600, 1534568400, 1523336400, 1563426000, 1595826000, 
1552712400, 1534309200, 1547960400), class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt"
), tzone = ""), total_sale = c(36.3853391310075, 35.9405038506853, 
55.6254974332793, 47.7214780063544, 61.4086594373677, 32.8631076291332, 
33.3640439679803, 40.8944394660076, 54.9455495252506, 48.12597580998
), season = c("Spring", "Winter", "Winter", "Fall", "Fall", "Spring", 
"Summer", "Summer", "Fall", "Fall"), time = c("00:00:00", "00:00:00", 
"00:00:00", "01:00:00", "01:00:00", "01:00:00", "01:00:00", "01:00:00", 
"01:00:00", "00:00:00")), row.names = c(NA, 10L), class = "data.frame")

I’m hoping to get more random times throughout the day like 9:33:35, 14:56:43, etc.

>Solution :

You can generate random times using –

data$time <- format(as.POSIXct(sample(86400, nrow(data)), origin = '1970-01-01'), '%T')

This generates random numbers from 1 to 86400 (seconds in a day) changes it to POSIXct type and extracts only the time from it using format.