How to change %Hh%M to %M form in R CSV?

Question

I am thinking how you can dynamically change the time duration form (etc 11h11 resembling %Hh%M) to minute form like %M. I think it is best to maintain the original data form used by EMFIT-QS device. Data

Name,Time_duration
Leo,11h11

Code

DF <- read.csv("/home/masi/Documents/Data/data.csv", header = T, sep = ",")
str(DF)

Outut

$ Time_duration         : Factor w/ 1 level 11h11",..

My proposal

1. Change data time duration to minutes where second column for specifying units to avoid confusion because non-standard units

   Name,Time_duration
   -, min
   Leo,671
   

2. Do not change the standard fields given by %Hh%M, I would really like to programmatically convert all fields manually to minute presentation %M

R: 3.3.3

Answer 1

You could use a custom colClasses function - as described in Specify custom Date format for colClasses argument in read.table/read.csv

To illustrate; given

$ cat file.csv 
Name,Time_duration
Leo,11h11

then in R

> setClass('myTime')
> 
> setAs('character','myTime', function(from) {
+ x <- as.POSIXlt(from, format='%Hh%M')
+ return (x$hour*60 + x$min)
+ })
> 
> data <- read.csv2(file='file.csv', sep=',', dec='.', header=TRUE, 
+ colClasses=c('character','myTime'))
> 
> data
  Name Time_duration
1  Leo           671
>