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How to calculate time diff and get the result in time format

I want diff time in time for the table below

A B
30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:59
30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58
30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58

all the methods have tried keep giving results like 1sec, but I want the result in time format like 00:00:02

this is the method I've tried below processing_time =difftime(time1 = Date , time2 = `Updated Time`, units = "secs")

Solution

  • Let's assume you have this data in a data.frame but have not yet converted the date-time values to POSIXct class. The this might succeed:

    dat$processing_time <- with(dat, difftime( as.POSIXct(B, format="%d/%m/%Y %H:%M") , 
                                           as.POSIXct(A, format="%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")))

> dat
                 A                B processing_time
1 30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:59         60 secs
2 30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58          0 secs
3 30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58          0 secs
4 30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58          0 secs
5 30/07/2021 23:58 30/07/2021 23:58          0 secs
6 30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58         60 secs
7 30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58         60 secs
8 30/07/2021 23:57 30/07/2021 23:58         60 secs

    Then you need to get that data in a form that format.POSIXt will respect:

    Perhaps:

     format(as.POSIXct(Sys.Date())+dat$processing_time, "%H:%M:%S")

    You might need to add or subtract hours to get that to appear correct since you probably did as I did and didn't enter a timezone so GMT was assumed.