Date & time handling

There are several classes and packages available for handling dates & times:

Date

• Date class (recommended), fractional number of days since Unix epoch
• IDate class, integer number of days since Unix epoch, defined by the data.table package (for use in data.tables)

Time

• ITime class, from the data.table package
• hms class, from the hms package

Datetime

• POSIXct class (recommended): stores datetime as the number of seconds since Unix epoch
• POSIXlt class: stores datetime as separate y/m/d/h/m/s components
• POSIXt base class

Config

Action	Code	Details
Set timezone for session	Sys.setenv(TZ='UCT')

Extract

Action	Code	Details
Get system time-zone region	Sys.timezone()	Warning: OS-specific output; check the documentation!