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Problem with the timeDate function

4 messages · Moshe Olshansky, Strong

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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
1 day later
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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:

            
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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
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From: Strong <strongthinking at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Finance] Problem with the timeDate function
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:06:35 +0900 (JST)

Dear all

I have already found a way to do it myself.

Suppose we have a character vector date like the following:

"2006.01" "2006.02" "2006.03" "2006.04" "2006.05" "2006.06"

First, use the function gsub to replace the "." with "-". 

date <- gsub("/", "-", date)

And then, use the function paste to add a date to it, say "01".

paste(date, "-01", sep="")

Finally, you can convert it to timeDate object by using function timeDate without any error message!

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



Regards

Strong Chen