Date-time data can be frustrating to work with in R. R commands for date-times are generally unintuitive and change depending on the type of date-time object being used. Moreover, the methods we use with date-times must be robust to time zones, leap days, daylight savings times, and other time related quirks, and R lacks these capabilities in some situations. Lubridate makes it easier to do the things R does with date-times and possible to do the things R does not. Specifically, lubridate provides:
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a set of intuitive date-time related functions that work the same way for all common date-time classes (including those from
chron,timeDate,zoo,xts,its,tis,timeSeries,fts, andtseries) -
quick and easy parsing of date-times:
ymd(),dmy(),mdy(), ... -
simple functions to extract and modify components of a date-time, such as years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds:
year(),month(),day(), ... -
helper functions for handling time zones:
with_tz(),force_tz()
Lubridate also expands the type of mathematical operations that can be performed with date-time objects. It introduces three new time span classes borrowed from http://joda.org.
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durations, which measure the exact amount of time between two points
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periods, which accurately track clock times despite leap years, leap seconds, and day light savings time
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intervals, a protean summary of the time information between two points