The hms package provides a simple class for storing durations or time-of-day values and displaying them in the hh:mm:ss format. This class is intended to simplify data exchange with databases, spreadsheets, and other data sources:

• Stores values as a numeric vector that contains the number of seconds since midnight
• Supports construction from explicit hour, minute, or second values
• Supports coercion to and from various data types, including POSIXt
• Can be used as column in a data frame
• Based on the difftime class
• Values can exceed the 24-hour boundary or be negative
• By default, fractional seconds up to a microsecond are displayed, regardless of the value of the "digits.secs" option

# The easiest way to get hms is to install the whole tidyverse:
install.packages("tidyverse")
# Alternatively, install just hms:
install.packages("hms")
# Or the the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tidyverse/hms")

The following example showcases ways of using the hms class standalone or as a data frame column.

library(hms)
hms(56, 34, 12)
#> 12:34:56
as_hms(Sys.time())
#> 11:55:02.553476
parse_hms("12:34:56")
#> 12:34:56
as.POSIXct(hms(1))
#> [1] "1970-01-01 00:00:01 UTC"
data.frame(hours = 1:3, hms = hms(hours = 1:3))
#>   hours      hms
#> 1     1 01:00:00
#> 2     2 02:00:00
#> 3     3 03:00:00

Objects of the hms and its underlying difftime classes are stored as number of seconds since 00:00:00. Use as.numeric() and as_hms() to convert to and from numbers.

times <- parse_hms(c("00:00:00.25", "00:00:01", "00:01:30", "01:00:00"))
times
#> 00:00:00.25
#> 00:00:01.00
#> 00:01:30.00
#> 01:00:00.00
times_num <- as.numeric(times)
times_num
#> [1]    0.25    1.00   90.00 3600.00
as_hms(times_num)
#> 00:00:00.25
#> 00:00:01.00
#> 00:01:30.00
#> 01:00:00.00

Please note that the ‘hms’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.