Overview
The hms package provides a simple class for storing durations or time-of-day values and displaying them in the hh:mm:ss format. This class is intended to simplify data exchange with databases, spreadsheets, and other data sources:
- Stores values as a numeric vector that contains the number of seconds since midnight
- Supports construction from explicit hour, minute, or second values
- Supports coercion to and from various data types, including
POSIXt
- Can be used as column in a data frame
- Based on the
difftime
class - Values can exceed the 24-hour boundary or be negative
- By default, fractional seconds up to a microsecond are displayed, regardless of the value of the
"digits.secs"
option
Installation
# The easiest way to get hms is to install the whole tidyverse: install.packages("tidyverse") # Alternatively, install just hms: install.packages("hms") # Or the the development version from GitHub: # install.packages("devtools") devtools::install_github("tidyverse/hms")
Usage
The following example showcases ways of using the hms
class standalone or as a data frame column.
library(hms) hms(56, 34, 12) #> 12:34:56 as_hms(Sys.time()) #> 11:55:02.553476 parse_hms("12:34:56") #> 12:34:56 as.POSIXct(hms(1)) #> [1] "1970-01-01 00:00:01 UTC" data.frame(hours = 1:3, hms = hms(hours = 1:3)) #> hours hms #> 1 1 01:00:00 #> 2 2 02:00:00 #> 3 3 03:00:00
Internal representation
Objects of the hms
and its underlying difftime
classes are stored as number of seconds since 00:00:00
. Use as.numeric()
and as_hms()
to convert to and from numbers.
times <- parse_hms(c("00:00:00.25", "00:00:01", "00:01:30", "01:00:00")) times #> 00:00:00.25 #> 00:00:01.00 #> 00:01:30.00 #> 01:00:00.00 times_num <- as.numeric(times) times_num #> [1] 0.25 1.00 90.00 3600.00 as_hms(times_num) #> 00:00:00.25 #> 00:00:01.00 #> 00:01:30.00 #> 01:00:00.00
Please note that the ‘hms’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.