Remove Time Component from Date-Time in R (3 Examples)

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to drop the time component from a date-time in R.

The table of content of this tutorial is structured as follows:

Let’s start right away.

Creation of Sample Data

First of all, we will need to create some sample data as a basis for this tutorial. We will create a vector with dates and times:

date_time <- c("2/05/2020 11:59:22",
               "12/06/2021 08:22:35",
               "3/10/2022 13:12:03",
               "7/04/2019 05:11:27")
date_time
 
# [1] "2/05/2020 11:59:22"  "12/06/2021 08:22:35"
# [3] "3/10/2022 13:12:03"  "7/04/2019 05:11:27"

Example 1: Remove Time Component from Date-Time Using format() & as.POSIXct() Functions

We can turn our strings into dates and then format our vector by using the format() and as.POSIXct() functions:

date1 <- format(as.POSIXct(date_time,
                           format = '%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S'),
                format = '%m/%d/%Y')
date1
 
# [1] "02/05/2020" "12/06/2021" "03/10/2022" "07/04/2019"

Example 2: Remove Time Component from Date-Time Using format() & dmy_hms() Functions

We can also use the format function in combination with the lubridate package to separate time from a date-time in a vector.

For this, please install the lubridate package if you haven’t installed it before:

install.packages('lubridate')

Next, load the package:

library(lubridate)

Now, we can use the dmy_hms() function in the lubridate package in combination with the format function to remove the time component from our vector:

date2 <- format(mdy_hms(date_time),
                format = "%m/%d/%Y")
date2
 
# [1] "02/05/2020" "12/06/2021" "03/10/2022" "07/04/2019"

Example 3: Remove Time Component from Date-Time Using round() & dmy_hms() Functions

Another alternative is provided by the round function. It can be used to round date-time objects by days:

date3 <- round(mdy_hms(date_time),
               unit = "day")
date3
# [1] "2020-02-05 UTC" "2021-12-06 UTC" "2022-03-11 UTC" "2019-07-04 UTC"

Note that the previous output still contains the time zone component.

As shown, we can remove the time component from our date-time vector in multiple ways.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you need more explanations on how to extract the date component from a date and time object in R? Then you might have a look at the following video of the Statistics Globe YouTube channel.

Additionally, you could have a look at some of the other tutorials on Statistics Globe:

• Convert Character String with AM & PM to Date & Time in R
• Remove Time from datetime in Python (Example)
• Remove NA Columns from xts Time Series in R
• Convert Four Digit Year Values to Class Date in R

This page has shown how to remove a time component from a date-time object in R. In case you have further questions, you might leave a comment below.

This page was created in collaboration with Paula Villasante Soriano. Please have a look at Paula’s author page to get more information about her academic background and the other articles she has written for Statistics Globe.