r - Import date-time at a specified timezone, disregard Daylight Savings Time

Question

I have time series data obtained from a data logger that was set to one time zone without daylight savings (NZST or UTC+12:00), and the data spans a few years. Data loggers don't consider DST changes, and are synchronized to local time with/without DST (depending who deployed it).

However, when I get the data into R, I'm unable to properly use as.POSIXct to ignore DST. I'm using R 2.14.0 on a Windows computer with these settings:

> Sys.timezone()
[1] "NZDT"
> Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
[1] "English_New Zealand.1252"

Here are three timestamps across the spring DST change, each are spaced 1 hour apart:

> ts_str <- c("28/09/2008 01:00", "28/09/2008 02:00", "28/09/2008 03:00")
> as.POSIXct(ts_str, format="%d/%m/%Y %H:%M", tz="")
[1] "2008-09-28 01:00:00 NZST" NA
[3] "2008-09-28 03:00:00 NZDT"
> as.POSIXct(ts_str, format="%d/%m/%Y %H:%M", tz="UTC")
[1] "2008-09-28 01:00:00 UTC" "2008-09-28 02:00:00 UTC"
[3] "2008-09-28 03:00:00 UTC"

As you can see, the clocks jumped forward at 1:59 to 3:00, so 2:00 is invalid, thus NA. Furthermore, I can use tz="UTC" to get it to ignore DST changes. However, I'd rather keep the correct time zone since I have other data series recorded with DST (NZDT or UTC+13:00) that I'd like to blend in (via merge) for my analysis.

How do I configure the tz parameter on a MS Windows computer? I've tried many things, such as "NZST", "New Zealand Standard Time", "UTC+12:00", "+1200", etc., but no luck. Or do I modify some other setting?

Answer 1

You can use tz="Etc/GMT+12":

as.POSIXct(ts_str, format="%d/%m/%Y %H:%M", tz="Etc/GMT+12")
[1] "2008-09-28 01:00:00 GMT+12" "2008-09-28 02:00:00 GMT+12"
[3] "2008-09-28 03:00:00 GMT+12"

For a full list of available timezones use,

dir(file.path(R.home("share"),"zoneinfo"), recursive=TRUE)

There are a couple of of .tab files in there which aren't timezones but hold some information, but my regex-fu isn't good enough to be able to exclude them with the pattern argument to dir.