Turning text with hours and minutes to minutes

Question

I have got a big dataframe that look like this:

from	to	distance in km	traveltime
1033	1076	1.8	6 mins
1035	1076	2.6	1 min
1036	1076	2.4	1 hour 26 mins
1037	1076	6.7	3 hours 1 min

i want get the traveltime column to show the traveltime in minutes, so like this:

from	to	distance in km	traveltime
1033	1076	1.8	6
1035	1076	2.6	1
1036	1076	2.4	86
1037	1076	6.7	181

I have tried the hm() function but it doesn't work on the values which are smaller than 1 hour.

Answer 1

Try this wrapping a time transformation in nested replacements for strings:

#Code
df$NewTime <- unname(sapply(sub('s','',sub("\\s+min",
                  "", sub("hour|hours", "* 60 +", df$traveltime))), 
              function(x) eval(parse(text=x))))

Output:

df
  from   to distance.in.km     traveltime NewTime
1 1033 1076            1.8         6 mins       6
2 1035 1076            2.6          1 min       1
3 1036 1076            2.4 1 hour 26 mins      86
4 1037 1076            6.7  3 hours 1 min     181

Some data used:

#Data
df <- structure(list(from = c(1033L, 1035L, 1036L, 1037L), to = c(1076L, 
1076L, 1076L, 1076L), distance.in.km = c(1.8, 2.6, 2.4, 6.7), 
    traveltime = c("6 mins", "1 min", "1 hour 26 mins", "3 hours 1 min"
    )), row.names = c(NA, -4L), class = "data.frame")

Another option using stringr:

library(stringr)
#Code 2
df$NewTime <- sapply(str_extract_all(df$traveltime, "\\d+"), function(x) {
  x1 <- as.numeric(x)
  if(length(x1)>1) x1[1]*60 + x1[2] else x1 })

It will produce the same output.