Problem with the timeDate function

From: Moshe Olshansky <m_olshansky at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Finance] Problem with the timeDate function
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:14:04 -0700 (PDT)

Thanks for your reply.

But,  what should I do to add a day to my original 1990.01 date string within R.

And, is there a way to convert the period in my date string to hyphen?



Strong Chen 

Hello,

I am also new to Rmetrics so take what I say with
caution.
The string "1990.01" is not a valid date - you must
add a day also (even if you do not care about the day
add a dummy one, let say 1, so that you date is
"1990.01.01"). This is a valid date but then you have
another problem (as indicated by your error message) -
if you specify date only then the format is assumed to
be "%Y-%m-%d" and so a period (.) can not be a
separator. So you can either specify the date as
"1990-01-01" or supply a valid time as well, i.e.
timeDate("1990.02.01.00.00.01",format="%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S").

Regards,

Moshe.
 
--- Strong <strongthinking at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear All

I am a beginner of Rmetrics.  It is the first time I
posts on the mailing list. 

I am having a problem with the use of timeDate
function. 

I tried to use timeDate function in the fCalendar
package to convert a character string of date to
into the timeDate object.

My script is something like the followings:

< date <- c("1990.01", "1990.02")

< date.td <- timeDate(date, format="%Y.%m")

And then, I got the following error message:

Error in if (sum(lt$sec + lt$min + lt$hour) == 0)
isoFormat = "%Y-%m-%d" : 
	missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
In addition: Warning message:
Unknown Format Specification in:
.whichFormat(charvec) 

I don't know what's wrong with my format
specification.  It seems the reason is I am not
using the standard iso format,  although I do
believe the flexible specification of time format is
allowed by the timeDate function just like in
S-Plus.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance.


Strong Chen
phd Student,  Graduate School of Commerce and
Management;
Hitotusbashi University, Tokyo, Japan