How do you change a vector from CHR to INT in R?

Question

New user of R here so forgive my ignorance but I've hit a bit of a bind!

I am currently working on a data set called Q1 which has a column for Start_Time that is displaying HH:MM except its vector is CHR and not INT or NUM.

I am currently trying to convert it to an INT or NUM so that I may change its format to HH:MM:SS but am having trouble doing so.

For Example:

Date <- c("11/22/22", "11/23/22", "11/24/22", "11/25/22")
Start_Time <- c("12:30", "14:25", "09:45", "17:50")
Q1 <- data.frame(Date, Start_Time)

So far I have tried

 strptime(Q1$Start_Time, format = "%H:%M:%S")

 as.integer(Q1$Start_Time)

 Q1 <- transform(Q1, Start_Time = as.integer(Start_Time))

 Q1 <- transform(Q1, Start_Time = as.numeric(Start_Time))

But all of these have returned a value of NA through my whole column or given me an error about NAs introduced by coercion.

Does anyone have any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank You!

Answer 1

as user @onyambu pointed out this question was answered by them here

But to also sum it up using as.ITime from the data.table worked perfectly

as.numeric(data.table::as.ITime(Q1$Start_Time))

and returned the values for

45000 51900 35100 64200

For anyone curious about converting it back to a HH:MM:SS format I used mutate

Q1 <- Q1 %>% mutate(Start_Time = hms::hms(Start_Time))

Thanks to everyone who pitched in!