How to preserve midnight timestamp in R when converting from MDY-HMS to YMD-HMS

I have a character string that gives a date and an a time stamp in the MDY-HMS format "12/14/23 12:00:00 AM"

When I use the mdy_hms function in lubridate to re-format the string as YMD-HMS, the timestamp is gone.

What can be done to make sure that the midnight timestamp is preserved?

When I use the mdy_hms function in lubridate to re-format the string as YMD-HMS, the timestamp is gone.

mdy_hms("12/14/23 12:00:00 AM")

"2023-12-14 UTC"

I've tested the mdy_hms function by replace the 12 in the hour as 00 and it gives the same result, but when the timestamp portion of the string is either 12:01:00 AM or 00:01:00 AM, the timestamp is preserved.

mdy_hms("12/14/23 12:01:00 AM")

"2023-12-14 00:01:00 UTC"

I want the output to be "2023-12-14 00:00:00 UTC"

Solution

It's not gone. It just how the value is printed out per default.

ala <- lubridate::mdy_hms("12/14/23 12:00:00 AM")
ala
#> [1] "2023-12-14 UTC"

Use format() to change it. And the computations (time difference) works properly:

format(ala, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
#> [1] "2023-12-14 00:00:00"

ola <- lubridate::mdy_hms("12/14/23 01:00:00 PM")

ola - ala
#> Time difference of 13 hours

^{Created on 2024-03-15 with reprex v2.1.0}