Below a specific cell from my dataset:
PT23M55.39S
The cell tells me how many minutes (23 minutes) and seconds (55.39 seconds) a user has spent on a webpage.
The cell is of the property char (character).
How do I convert it to a numeric where I express the visit time in only seconds (23 * 60 + 55.39 = 1435.39 seconds)?
Using lubridate functions ms and period_to_seconds you can do -
library(lubridate)
x <- 'PT23M55.39S'
period_to_seconds(ms(x))
#[1] 1435.39
In base R, you may use strcapture to extract the data using regex into minutes and seconds separately, multiply minutes value by 60 and add the two numbers.
strcapture('[A-Z]+(\\d+)M(\\d+\\.\\d+)', x,
proto = list(minutes = numeric(), seconds = numeric())) |>
transform(duration_in_seconds = minutes * 60 + seconds)
