problem with strptime example (PR#811)

ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:

On Thu, 11 Jan 2001 stephen@anc.ed.ac.uk wrote:

Hi,

The help file for strptime has the following code which doesn't work
for me:

     ## read in date info in format `ddmmmyyyy'
     x <- c("1jan1960", "2jan1960", "31mar1960", "30jul1960")
     z <- strptime(x, "%d%b%Y")

z

[1] "NA" "NA" "NA" "NA"

Do these work for other people?

Yes, on several platforms.  It will be a problem with your OS's strptime
code.  It must be, I think, as the alternative we supply works.

whereas it works fine if I use a separator (/) in the date@

strptime("9/Feb/1960", "%d/%b/%Y")

[1] "1960-02-09"

strptime("9Feb1960", "%d%b%Y")

[1] "NA"

We really do not put out new features without testing them!

Also very strange on WinNT4.0 (R-1.2.0):


  x <- c("1jan1960", "2jan1960", "31mar1960", "30jul1960")
  z <- strptime(x, "%d%b%Y")
  z
[1] "1960-01-01 01:00:00" "1960-01-02 01:00:00" "NA"
"1960-07-30 01:00:00"