I am using the new version of data.table and especially the AWESOME fread function. My files contain dates that are loaded as strings (cause I don't know to do it otherwise) looking like 01APR2008:09:00:00.

I need to sort the data.table on those datetimes and then for the sort to be efficient to cast then in the IDateTime format (or anything alse I would not know yet).

> strptime("01APR2008:09:00:00","%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S")
[1] "2008-04-01 09:00:00"

> IDateTime(strptime("01APR2008:09:00:00","%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S"))
        idate    itime
1: 2008-04-01 09:00:00

> IDateTime("01APR2008:09:00:00","%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S")
Error in charToDate(x) : 
character string is not in a standard unambiguous format

It looks like I cannot do DT[ , newType := IDateTime(strptime(oldType, "%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S"))].

My questions are then:

  1. Is there a way to cast directly to IDateTime from fread, such that I can sort afterward efficiently?
  2. If not, what is the most efficient way to go knowing that I would like to be able to sort DT by this datetime column
r datetime data.table
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