as.Date() does not work with format %B

Not that this is at all likely to be helpful, but it seems to be month
dependent in my locale:
strftime("1998-07-09", "%d %B %Y")
[1] "09 July 1998"
as.Date("09 July 1998", "%d %B %Y")
[1] "1998-07-09"
Sys.getlocale()
[1] "en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8"

# Now switch to france
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "fr_FR.UTF-8")
[1] "fr_FR.UTF-8"
strftime("1998-07-09", "%d %B %Y")
[1] "09 juillet 1998"
as.Date("09 juillet 1998", "%d %B %Y")
[1] NA
as.Date("09 avril 1998", "%d %B %Y")
[1] "1998-04-09"

and more generally
as.Date(strftime(paste("1998",1:12,"09", sep = "-"), "%d %B %Y"), "%d %B %Y")
[1] "1998-01-09" "1998-02-09" "1998-03-09" "1998-04-09" "1998-05-09"
 [6] "1998-06-09" NA           "1998-08-09" "1998-09-09" "1998-10-09"
[11] "1998-11-09" "1998-12-09"
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "en_US.UTF-8")
sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  compiler  stats     methods
[8] base

other attached packages:
[1] lattice_0.20-6  ggplot2_0.9.1   quantmod_0.3-18 TTR_0.21-1
[5] xts_0.8-7       zoo_1.7-7       Defaults_1.1-1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.1-1   dichromat_1.2-4    digest_0.5.2       grid_2.15.0
 [5] labeling_0.1       MASS_7.3-18        memoise_0.1        munsell_0.3
 [9] plyr_1.7.1         proto_0.3-9.2      RColorBrewer_1.0-5 reshape2_1.2.1
[13] scales_0.2.1       stringr_0.6

Not sure why that would be though...

Michael
Hi!

I currently experience a problem with my package tm.plugin.factiva on
Macs. I need to parse a locale-dependent date string into a proper Date
object. It works fine on Linux and Windows, but on a Mac I've tested,
parsing dates containing the %B format (for full month name) does not
work.

It's very easy to reproduce (here in French, but it's straightforward to
adapt it to your locale):

# Check that formatting dates works: OK
strftime("1998-07-09", "%d %B %Y")
[1] "09 juillet 1998"
# Try to convert the same string to a date: FAIL
as.Date("9 juillet 1998", format="%d %B %Y")
[1] NA
as.Date("09 juillet 1998", format="%d %B %Y")
[1] NA

The locale looks good:
Sys.getlocale()
[1] "fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8/C/fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8"

And setting LC_TIME manually does not change anything:
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "fr_FR.UTF-8")
[1] "fr_FR.UTF-8"
as.Date("9 juillet 1998", "%d %B %Y")
[1] NA

FWIW, I've also tried using strptime() instead of as.Date(), and the
problem is the same.

This is with R 2.15.0 on Mac OS 10.6.8.

sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Platform: i386-apple-darwin9.8.0/i386 (32-bit)
locale:
[1] fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8/C/fr_FR.UTF-8/fr_FR.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats ? ? graphics ?grDevices utils ? ? datasets ?methods ? base

Any clues much appreciated! ;-)

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as.Date() does not work with format %B

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