UTC offsets can be formatted in multiple ways (e.g. -07, -07:00, -0700) and R often struggles to parse these offsets. This function takes date/time strings with valid UTC offsets, and formats them so that they are consistent and readable by R. Here, you can supply a vector of dates in ISO 8601 format and they will be returned in a consistent format compatible with R. Date strings with missing or invalid UTC offsets will result in a warning.
fix_utc_offset(datetime_strings)datetime_strings with UTC offsets consistently formatted to four digits (e.g. "2023-11-16T03:32:49-0700").
datetimes <- c("2023-11-16T03:32:49+07:00", "2023-11-16T03:32:49-07",
"2023-11-16T03:32:49","2023-11-16T03:32:49Z")
fix_utc_offset(datetimes)
#> Warning: Date strings contain missing or invalid UTC offsets
#> [1] "2023-11-16T03:32:49+0700" "2023-11-16T03:32:49-0700"
#> [3] "2023-11-16T03:32:49" "2023-11-16T03:32:49+0000"