Parsing Dates and Time – Part 3: Exercises

In the exercises below, we will continue our work with the lubridate package to see more features of it.

Answers to these exercises are available here.

If you obtained a different (correct) answer than those listed on the solutions page, please feel free to post your answer as a comment on that page.

Exercise 1
Lubridate offers two functions to see the date and date-time, at the moment, in the system. Use them to see the time in your time zone.
Exercise 2

There is a base function named “difftime” to find time difference between two times. Now use this to find out the time difference in weeks between.
x <- "11 th april 2012"
y <- "April 24th 2018 11:59:59"

Exercise 3

Do the same as above and find the difference between the system time and x, in hours.

Exercise 4

Lets say we have:
x <- "11 th april 2018 11.30.00"

We want to add one day to x. How do we achieve that?

Exercise 5

Now add 100 hours to x and find which date-time it is.

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Learn more about Data Pre-Processing in the online course R Data Pre-Processing & Data Management – Shape your Data!. In this course you will learn how to:

• Work with different packages that help shape dates and times,
• learn about the lubridate package for quick and easy dates and times,
• and much more

Exercise 6

Now, how can we get the date-time of 3 weeks prior to x?

Exercise 7

Now, read about the duration and spans from lubridate’s vignette. Try getting the date-time 10 years prior to x first by subtracting with years and then by using 10 year duration’s. See if they are similar and try to reason it.