time - Delta Timestamp Parsing in R (Nanoseconds, Microseconds, Milliseconds)

Question

I am working in R and need to change the timestamp from what I believe is nanosecond precision to either microsecond precision or millisecond precision (I believe it needs to be milliseconds or only three digits past the decimal).

Example of two of the timestamps

"2019-03-02D00:00:12.214841000"

Part of the difficulty is I don't think there is a package like lubridate to handle it. I'm not sure if I need to use a regular expression to extract the seconds and then transform the nanoseconds to milliseconds. I'm open to any suggestions.

Also, how do you recommend dealing with the D? I was thinking I should use gsub("D", "-", df$timestamp) and maybe then a package like lubridate could parse the timestamp even with the nanosecond precision?

Answer 1

You can use the library nanotime which is related to integer64(really high precision float)

library(nanotime)
x<-nanotime("2019-03-02T00:00:12.214841000+00:00")

As you can see, you need to change D for T and add 00:00to the end, but that is easyly done as symbolrush showed you.

x<-nanotime(paste0(gsub("D", "T", "2019-03-02D00:00:12.214841000"), "+00:00"))

See more here:

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/nanotime.html