How to define +/- sign in as.difftime in R? -

i have strings representing time offsets, have + , - signs, such as:

string1 <- c("+00:30", "-07:00")

how can convert these as.difftime format? know if there no signs, have written as.difftime(string1, format = "%h:%m") , work. however, not know how handle signs. want use resulted difftime converting utc time lst.

i appreciate time , in advance.

it possible using as.difftime , format = "%z" there couple of issues. first, colon isn't valid part of time zone specifier. second, output seems relative current timezone. here's function gets round those:

tz_to_difftime <- function(x, 0 = "+0000") {   out <- as.difftime(c(zero, gsub("[: ]", "", x)),                      format = "%z")   out[1] - out[-1] } tz_to_difftime("+05:30") 

note work differences of 14 hours in current r (less on older versions).

here's alternative using strsplit:

tz_to_difftime2 <- function(x) {   as.difftime(sapply(strsplit(x, ":"),     function(x) as.numeric(x) %*% c(1, 1/60)),     units = "hours") } 

and if things more pipey (using magtittr)

tz_to_difftime3 <- . %>%   strsplit(":") %>%   sapply(     . %>%     as.numeric %>%     multiply_by_matrix(c(1, 1/60))   ) %>%   as.difftime(unit = "hours") 

these last 2 have advantage they'll take number of hours.