R Tutorial: Why lubridate?

Key Takeaways

as you've seen our has some built-in support for storing dates and date times but for the rest of the course you'll learn about a package called date date is designed to make working with dates and times as easy as possible in our it's a tidy verse package which means it obeys some key principles including playing nicely with ours existing date/time objects and being designed for humans not computers it also means it will fit nicely in your data analysis pipelines that use other tidy verse tools in particular in this course you'll combine date with deep liar and ggplot2 to answer questions about data that includes a date/time variable one nice aspect is that you don't need to worry about whether your date times are stored in date objects POSIX e.t objects or even time series objects like zoo or XTS the date functions will have consistent behavior you only need to learn one function for any kind of date/time object you'll start by seeing how easy loop makes it to pass a character string into a date/time object although R has some built-in passing functions date functions are simpler to use more forgiving of different formats and even allow passing of many formats in one vector then you'll learn about date functions for extracting and manipulating components of a date/time you'll be able to pull out the month day of the week or day of the year from a date/time combined with d player and GG plot that will allow you to make plots like this joy plot of the maximum daily temperature by month in Auckland date also has special objects for handling time spans the time that passes between two time points you'll learn how to use time spans to generate sequences of date times and calculate the length of time intervals like the length of reigns of Kings and Queens of England in the final chapter you'll learn about lubricate functions for dealing with time zones fast passing of date times and outputting date times ready to get started I'll see you in the next chapter