R help - Sep 2009 - as.POSIXct(as.Date()) independent of timezone

Dear R users,
I am struggling a bit with the converting dates to full POSIX timestamps, in
particular, I would like to somehow force the timezone to be local, i.e. the
output of
as.POSIXct(as.Date("2008-07-01")) should always be equal to
"2008-07-01
00:00:00", is that achievable ? I tried to set the origin and the timezone,
neither of which seems to make a difference.
On my Mac Book Pro (R version 2.9.1) which is set to Eastern US time zone, I
obtain the shifted result:
> as.POSIXct(as.Date("2008-07-01"))
[1] "2008-06-30 20:00:00 EDT"

And e.g.
> as.POSIXct( Sys.Date())
[1] "2009-09-17 20:00:00 EDT"
> Sys.time()
[1] "2009-09-18 10:10:48 EDT"

Any help would make life simpler for me.

Thanks,
Markus

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Try this:
> as.POSIXct(format(as.Date("2008-07-01")))
[1] "2008-07-01 EDT"

See R News 4/1 for more.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Markus Loecher
<markus.loecher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear R users,
> I am struggling a bit with the converting dates to full POSIX timestamps,
in
> particular, I would like to somehow force the timezone to be local, i.e.
the
> output of
> as.POSIXct(as.Date("2008-07-01")) should always be equal to
"2008-07-01
> 00:00:00", is that achievable ? I tried to set the origin and the
timezone,
> neither of which seems to make a difference.
> On my Mac Book Pro (R version 2.9.1) which is set to Eastern US time zone,
I
> obtain the shifted result:
>> as.POSIXct(as.Date("2008-07-01"))
> [1] "2008-06-30 20:00:00 EDT"
>
> And e.g.
>> as.POSIXct( Sys.Date())
> [1] "2009-09-17 20:00:00 EDT"
>> Sys.time()
> [1] "2009-09-18 10:10:48 EDT"
>
> Any help would make life simpler for me.
>
> Thanks,
> Markus
>
> ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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