Thanks for the responses i received from David and Spencer. As for the package Ecfun, i looked at it briefly, but it's long and i am new to R; so this just adds to my confusion. David suggested the sub function which i will try and see what i get.i s As i said earlier i have no problems reading dates w/o time and i was able to produce a function that can be included in colClasses to reformat date correctly and convert them to class date. i even stumbled on a way to convert my time data to time class via the chron package. Here is what i did times(paste0(t1, ":00")) where t1 is the first element of the column named Time. The problem i have now is how to incorporate this function/command into the colClasses in read.table so that i don't have to convert every entry in each column, one at a time. Thank you for the help. EK [[alternative HTML version deleted]]