Parsing and working with microsecond-precision timestamps in R using dplyr

November 5, 2024

I’m planning to collect data with microsecond-precision timestamps in the format "DD/MM/YY HH:MM:SS.mmmuuun"? How would I parse in R and keep working in a dplyr pipeline?

Example:

"26/09/24 11a:16:36.5933210"

df <- data.frame(
  ID = c(1, 1, 1),
  Timestamp = c("26/09/24 11a:16:36.5933210",
                "26/09/24 11a:16:36.6518648",
                "26/09/24 11p:16:36.7280308"),
  CH = c(11, 11, 11)
)

I would still like to retain the date and time information for later correlation with observations. Note "a" for am and "p" for pm.

>Solution :

Using dmy_hms with AM/PM moved to the end of the string.

library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

df %>% 
  mutate(Timestamp_new = dmy_hms(sub("( \\d{2})([ap])(.*$)", "\\1\\3 \\2m", Timestamp)),
         ms = format(Timestamp_new, "%OS3"))
  ID                  Timestamp CH       Timestamp_new     ms
1  1 26/09/24 11a:16:36.5933210 11 2024-09-26 11:16:36 36.593
2  1 26/09/24 11a:16:36.6518648 11 2024-09-26 11:16:36 36.651
3  1 26/09/24 11a:16:36.7280308 11 2024-09-26 11:16:36 36.728

Note you can also use as.POSIXct with "%d/%m/%y %I:%M:%OS3"