Get current time in UTC/GMT using base R

user_16024709 0
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I want to get current time in UTC/GMT using base R. Sys.time() gives me time in my local time zone. I know using lubridate I can do lubridate::now(tz = 'UTC') to get what I want but I want to do this using base R since I want to have as minimum dependency as possible.

I have tried to look around on SO for the answer but have not found any post answering my question.

One idea I had was to add/subtract number of hours my local time zone is behind/ahead of GMT respectively but I cannot use it since the code would be deployed on a server where I don't know what would be the local time zone. Also this seems to be hacky and not robust.

Is there a robust way of doing this?

r datetime
2 Answers

One of the option might be:

Sys.setenv(TZ="GMT")
user_196720610

You can set the attribute of the date/time object after you create it. For example

now_utc <- function() {
   now <- Sys.time()
   attr(now, "tzone") <- "UTC"
   now
}
now_utc()
# [1] "2022-08-23 13:34:36 UTC"
user_23720640
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