Converting string column to datetime variable using as.POSIXct function in R

I would like to convert a string column into a datetime variable. I tried it with different functions, but no one seems to work. I would be grateful if someone of you could help me.

print(as.POSIXct(data$MTU, format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", tz = "Europe/Berlin"))

so I want from this:

to achieve something like this:

There are several problems:

• the subject of the question and sample code refer to POSIXct but the sample output is not POSIXct
• the format used in the code in the question says the input is a year followed by a minus followed by a month, etc. but that is not the format of the sample input
• we can't tell whether the input is day, month, year or whether it is month, day, year since the input shown is ambiguous. We will assume day comes first.
• there are two date/times in the string, not one

Here is some code which may help.

This gives each of the two date/times as POSIXct. We have assumed that the first number in each is the day and the second is the month. Note that the time may be suppressed on output if the time is 00:00 but that is just how it is printed. The value is still full POSIXct.

x <- "01.01.2022 00:00- 01.01.2022 00:15" # test input

as.POSIXct(x, format = "%d.%m.%Y %H:%M", tz = "Europe/Berlin") # 1st
## [1] "2022-01-01 CET"

as.POSIXct(sub(".*-", "", x), format = "%d.%m.%Y %H:%M", 
  tz = "Europe/Berlin") # 2nd
## [1] "2022-01-01 00:15:00 CET"

This gives the date as Date class

as.Date(x, format = "%d.%m.%Y") # 1st date
## [1] "2022-01-01"

as.Date(sub(".*-", "", x), format = "%d.%m.%Y") # 2nd date
## [1] "2022-01-01"

This gives the two dates date as strings. We replace the first space encountered plus everything following with the empty string. We then replace everything up to - followed by dash, a captured string and space followed by anything with the captured string.

sub(" .*", "", x) # first date as string
## [1] "01.01.2022"

sub(".*- (.*) .*", "\", x) # second date as string
## [1] "01.01.2022"

This gives the time string shown in the question. We replace each occurrence of optional spaces, 10 non-space characters and additional optional spaces with the empty string.

gsub(" *\\S{10} *", "", x)
## [1] "00:00-00:15"