[R] Conversion of String to Datetime: How to Keep Timezone Offset when Printing?

[Jeff Newmiller]

No. Sorry. A POSIXct vector can have only one timezone. Kind of goes along with the whole vectorization thing.

You could fake it with lists, but they are dramatically less convenient. I suppose you could also fake it by developing your own variation on the POSIXct class... but that would be rather slower than the standard version.

On June 4, 2021 11:20:07 AM PDT, Thomas Bulka <thomas.tb.bulka using gmail.com> wrote:
>Hello list,
>
>I do have a hard time handling date and time data with different
>timezone offsets. Say, I have two strings which represent different
>dates/times, like so:
>
>DT1 <- "2021-06-19T13:45:00-03:00"
>DT2 <- "2020-07-20T11:39:12+02:00"
>my_dates <- c(DT1, DT2)
>
>What I want to do now, is to covert those strings into some kind of
>datetime object which allows for comparisons (earlier/later etc.).
>
>Using as_datetime from the lubridate package seems to do the trick,
>but it converts DT1 and DT2 with reference to UTC. I guess, this makes
>sense from a computational point of view, since, most likely, this is
>how R internally handles dates and times.
>
>However, I would like to be able to at least visually distinguish the
>different timezone offsets, if the data is printed. I'm able to
>manually set a timezone with the tz parameter of as_datetime:
>
>as_datetime(DT1, tz = "EDT")
>[1] "2020-07-20 09:39:12 EDT"
>
>But this only works if I enter the timezone manually.
>
>So what I want to ask is this: Is there any possibility, to convert
>all entries of a vector my_dates (see above) into datetime objects
>while keeping a visual indication of each timezone offset when the
>data is printed?
>
>Please excuse any awkward phrasing; being pretty new to R, I probably
>did not phrase anything correctly.
>
>Thank you very much in advance!
>
>Thomas
>
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-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.