In this post we will learn to work with date and time data in R. We will use the lubridate package developed by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham ~@lubridate. This package makes it easy to work with dates and time. Let’s us load the packages that we will use require(lubridate) require(tidyverse) require(magrittr) require(oce) Data We will use the profiles data from Argo within the Indian Ocean. The data was downloaded from the Coriolis Global Data Assembly Center site (ftp://ftp.

Most data we collect has a time stamp. The time stamp indicate the date and time the data was collected. Dealing with dates is a complicated task becuase of different formats and the time zones. R has built in functions that make your life working with dates and times a bit easier. In addition, @lubridate developed a lubridate package that allows to work smoothly with dates and times.

One of the key task in data preparation is to organize thee dataset in a way that makes analysis and plottng easier. In practice, the data is often not stored like that and the data comes to us with repeated observations included on a single row. This is often done as a memory saving technique or because there is some structure in the data that makes the ‘wide’ format attractive.

Before a dataset can be analysed in R, its often manipulated or transformed in various ways. For years manipulating data in R required more programming than actually analyzing data. That has improved dramatically with the dplyr package. It provides programmers with an intuitive vocabulary for executing data management and analysis tasks. Hadley Wickham [-@dplyr], the original creator of the dplyr package, refers to it as a Grammar of Data Manipulation.

You can lean R with the dataset it comes with when you install it in your machine. But sometimes you want to use the real data you or someone gathered already. One of critical steps for data processing is to import data with special format into R workspace.Data import refers to read data from the working directory into the workspace. In this chapter you will learn how to import common files into R.