Compare Dates With RForcecom

Have you used RForcecom to connect R to Salesforce? It’s really cool, and thanks to it using Bulk API, it’s absolutely rapid. Anyway, I recently came across a problem when trying to query records which had been edited based on the timestamp. I wanted to do something like this: time_now<-Sys.time() q <- paste0(“select Id from opportunity where LastModifiedDate > “,time_now) updated_ids<-rforcecom.query(session,q); However, the Salesforce time format does not appear to match any of the POSIXlt or POSIXct formats in R (please correct me if I’m wrong!).The problem appears to be that R datetimes are generally similar to this: “2016-11-12 12:15:32 GMT” whereas the Salesforce format has a “T” (between the date and time) and a “Z” (after the time) in there for good measure. “2016-11-12T12:15:32Z” I spent a while trying to do an R conversion, then after some minor irritation just did my own hack function which appears to work: convertToSalesforceTime<-function(mytime) { output<-paste0(as.Date(mytime),”T”,strftime(mytime,format=’%H:%M:%S’),”Z”) return(output) } Now, if you do the code in full as below, you can query using RForcecom and only select records within certain time periods! # Assume already logged in to the API… # run the function convertToSalesforceTime&lt;-function(mytime) { output<-paste0(as.Date(mytime),”T”,strftime(mytime,format=’%H:%M:%S’),”Z”) return(output) } # get the time you want to query time_now<-Sys.time() # convert it so Salesforce is happy sf_time_now<-convertToSalesforceTime(time_now) # query Salesforce q <- paste0(“select Id from opportunity where LastModifiedDate > “,time_now) updated_ids<-rforcecom.query(session,q) I’m sure there’s a real way around this but I couldn’t find it on Google, so this may prove helpful to someone. Also, I believe the T and Z are something to do with time zone, so please take extra care when working across multiple timezones.