A gist about displaying POSIXlt intervals using R and ggplot

timelines.posixlt.R

library("ggplot2")

#sample logfile
logfile = "
   task a,2013-10-10 11:16:16,2013-10-10 11:21:16
   task b,2013-10-10 11:15:16,2013-10-10 11:18:45
   task c,2013-10-10 11:20:20,2013-10-10 11:21:00
   task d,2013-10-10 11:14:23,2013-10-10 11:19:30
"

# read in the sample logfile in a data frame
df = read.csv(
  text=logfile,
  header=FALSE,
  sep = ",", 
  stringsAsFactors=FALSE,
  blank.lines.skip=TRUE
)

# give the column a proper name
names(df)=c('name', 'start','end')

#use strptime to convert time strings to POSIXlt
df$start = strptime(df$start, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS")
df$end   = strptime(df$end,   "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS")

# Define the top and bottom of the errorbars

ggplot(df, aes(start, reorder(name, as.POSIXct(start)), colour = name)) + 
  geom_errorbarh(aes(xmin = start,xmax = end, height = 0.2))