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as.Date (and strptime?) does not recognize "  " as a blank

4 messages · Maxim Nazarov, Spencer Graves

Original
Spencer Graves
# 
Hello, All:


	  When is a space not a space?


	  Consider the following:


 > (pblmDate <- textutils::HTMLdecode("&nbsp;2 Mar 2018"))
[1] " 2 Mar 2018"
 > as.Date(pblmDate, format='%e %b %Y')
[1] NA
 > as.Date(' 2 Mar 2018', format='%e %b %Y')
[1] "2018-03-02"


	  Is this a feature or a bug?


	  I can work around it, now that I know what it is, but it took me a 
few hours to diagnose.


	  Thanks,
	  Spencer Graves


p.s.  I got this from scraping a website with code that had worked for 
me roughly 20 months ago.  I suspect that in the interim, someone 
probably replaced ' 2 Mar 2018' with "&nbsp;2 Mar 2018".
Spencer Graves
# 
p.s.  Is there a way to get XML::readHTMLTable to automatically convert 
"&nbsp;" to a normal blank space?
On 6/25/22 1:37 AM, Spencer Graves wrote:
Maxim Nazarov
# 
Hello,
I guess the answer is when it is a non-breaking one?..

We can observe:
 > charToRaw(textutils::HTMLdecode("&nbsp;"))
 [1] c2 a0
 > charToRaw(" ")
 [1] 20
So one can argue that everything works correctly - `textutils` function converts HTML's non-breaking space '&nbsp;' into R's non-breaking space '\xa0', while %e format of as.Date expects a 'normal' space.
But this is obviously not user-friendly especially since both symbols are displayed the same way on the console.
So your options might be to either:
 * manually change all 'weird' spaces into normal ones with something like gsub("\\h", " ", ..., perl = TRUE) - for the list of other weird spaces see https://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/pcrepattern.html#genericchartypes
 * persuade textutils author to change &nbsp; into a normal space (they seem to be working with a simple lookup table - https://github.com/enricoschumann/textutils/blob/b813c7bd4b55daef5fa7612e3fbfe82962711940/R/char_refs.R#L1465-L1466)
 * persuade R-Core (or submit a PR) to relax expectations of as.Date/strptime

Kind regards,
Maxim Nazarov
----- On Jun 25, 2022, at 8:37 AM, Spencer Graves spencer.graves at prodsyse.com wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Spencer Graves
    

    

      
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Hi, Maxim et al.:

        
On 6/25/22 6:10 AM, Maxim Nazarov wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Thanks for the reply.  Since "this is obviously not user-friendly", 
as you noted, I felt a need to bring it to the attention of this group, 
and let them decide what if anything they would want to do about it.


	  In any event, I found a fix for my immediate problem.  It's not as 
elegant as yours, but it works.

	  Best Wishes,
	  Spencer