[R] Read in data table, change columns from factors

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2018, David Winsemius wrote:

> It's not so much as factors but rather in a form that paste() will coerce
> to character so you cna get the automatic format

David,

   Now I understand.

> Maybe you need to add a format string. It might force some of your pasted
> date+time values to NA but at least you would be able to identify the
> original values and perhaps fix errors.

   Thinking about the data I realize that rather than separate date and time
columns what's needed is a datetime string. I'll add the format string in
the morning and work on this.

> You really should include a large snapshot of data that will allow
> reproducibility.

   I'll certainly do this. With hourly and half-hourly data from 1989-June
2018 (but missing all of 1992) there are more than 400K rows in the raw data
file. If you would suggest how many would be an acceptably large number I'll
be happy to put that on a 'cloud' sharing site and provide the URL to it.

Best regards,

Rich