as.Date.character suggestion
On 21 Aug 2014, at 02:21 , Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
Ah, my mistake, I read too fast. (My code is also wrong, embarassingly). It seems like it's behavior when you pass it "" is simply a bug, then. Sorry for the noise, ~G
It's not a bug, it's just that you are at the mercy of strptime() if you do specify a format. If the format doesn't contain a conversion for some component, you get the value corresponding to the current date and leftover characters are just ignored, e.g.
strptime("1-1foo","%m-%d")
[1] "2014-01-01" and the extreme case is that a "" format gives current date, whatever the input. On Mac OSX Mavericks anyway --- this stuff is system-dependent. So I think Peter Langfelder is absolutely right, remove the default, which is never used anyway, and possibly update the documentation with a more direct reference to strptime(). This should have near-zero effect on the semantics. Peter D.
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Peter Langfelder < peter.langfelder at gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
Could do both to preserve bc... if(missing(format) || !nchar(format))
No, the problem is that the function behaves differently when format is missing than when it equals its default. Removing this difference necessarily changes behaviour and hence (at least in principle) breaks backward compatibility. Peter
-- Gabriel Becker Graduate Student Statistics Department University of California, Davis [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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