Given a data.table with date-time strings, this function converts those dates-times to type POSIXct with the appropriate time zone. Assumption is that dates are of the form "2016-07-25T22:15:19Z" where T is just a separator and the last letter is a military timezone.
This is a side-effect-free function: it returns a new data.table and the input data.table is unmodified.
parse_date_time(input_df, date_cols, assume_tz = "UTC")a data.table with one or more date-time columns you want to convert
Character vector of column names to convert. Columns should have string dates of the form "2016-07-25T22:15:19Z".
Timezone to convert to if parsing fails. Default is UTC
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/military
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
# NOT RUN {
# Sample es_search(), chomp_hits(), or chomp_aggs() output:
someDT <- data.table::data.table(id = 1:5
, company = c("Apple", "Apple", "Banana", "Banana", "Cucumber")
, timestamp = c("2015-03-14T09:26:53B", "2015-03-14T09:26:54B"
, "2031-06-28T08:53:07Z", "2031-06-28T08:53:08Z"
, "2000-01-01"))
# Note that the date field is character right now
str(someDT)
# Let's fix that!
someDT <- parse_date_time(input_df = someDT
, date_cols = "timestamp"
, assume_tz = "UTC")
str(someDT)
# }