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https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime

Anything to POSIXct or Date Converter
https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime

boost c-plus-plus-11 conversions cpp11 cran date datetime posixct r rcpp

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Anything to POSIXct or Date Converter

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README 

        
## anytime: Anything to 'POSIXct' or 'Date' Converter



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### Motivation



R excels at computing with dates, and times.  Using _typed_ representation for your data is highly

recommended not only because of the functionality offered but also because of the added safety

stemming from proper representation.



But there is a small nuisance cost in interactive work as well as in programming. Users must have

told `as.POSIXct()` about a million times that the origin is (of course) the

[epoch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time). Do we really have to say it a million more times?

Similarly, when parsing dates that are _some form_ of YYYYMMDD format, do we really have to manually

convert from `integer` or `numeric` or `factor` or `ordered` to character? Having one of several

common separators and/or date / time month forms (YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD, YYYYMMDD, YYYY-mon-DD and

so on, with or without times), do we really need a format string? Or could a smart converter

function do this?



`anytime()` aims to be that _general purpose_ converter returning a proper `POSIXct` (or `Date`)

object no matter the input (provided it was somewhat parseable), relying on

[Boost date_time](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/doc/html/date_time.html) for the (efficient,

performant) conversion. `anydate()` is an additional wrapper returning a `Date` object instead.



### Documentation



Package documentation, help pages, a vignette, and more is available

[here](https://eddelbuettel.github.io/anytime/).



### Examples



We show some simple examples on `Date` types.



(Note that in the first few examples, and for numeric conversion in this range we now

only use `anydate` as `anytime` is consistent in computing seconds since epoch. If you want the

behaviour of version older than 0.3.0, set `oldHeuristic=TRUE`, see `help(anytime)` for more.)



#### From Integer or Numeric or Factor or Ordered



```r

library(anytime)                      ## also caches TZ in local env

options(digits.secs=6)                ## for fractional seconds below



## integer

anydate(20160101L + 0:2)              ## older version used anytime for this too

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"



## numeric

anydate(20160101 + 0:2)

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"



## factor

anydate(as.factor(20160101 + 0:2))

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"



## ordered

anydate(as.ordered(20160101 + 0:2))

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"

```



#### Character: Simple



```r

## Dates: Character

anydate(as.character(20160101 + 0:2))

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"



## Dates: alternate formats

anydate(c("20160101", "2016/01/02", "2016-01-03"))

[1] "2016-01-01 CST" "2016-01-02 CST" "2016-01-03 CST"

```



#### Character: ISO



```r

## Datetime: ISO with/without fractional seconds

anytime(c("2016-01-01 10:11:12", "2016-01-01 10:11:12.345678"))

[1] "2016-01-01 10:11:12.000000 CST" "2016-01-01 10:11:12.345678 CST"



## Datetime: ISO alternate (?) with 'T' separator

anytime(c("20160101T101112", "20160101T101112.345678"))

[1] "2016-01-01 10:11:12.000000 CST" "2016-01-01 10:11:12.345678 CST"

```



#### Character: Textual month formats



```r

## ISO style

anytime(c("2016-Sep-01 10:11:12", "Sep/01/2016 10:11:12", "Sep-01-2016 10:11:12"))

[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12 CDT" "2016-09-01 10:11:12 CDT" "2016-09-01 10:11:12 CDT"



## Datetime: Mixed format (cf https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39259184)

anytime(c("Thu Sep 01 10:11:12 2016", "Thu Sep 01 10:11:12.345678 2016"))

[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12.000000 CDT" "2016-09-01 10:11:12.345678 CDT"

```



#### Character: Dealing with DST



This shows an important aspect. When not working localtime (by overriding to `UTC`) the _changing

difference_ UTC is correctly covered (which the underlying

[Boost Date_Time](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/doc/html/date_time.html) library does not by

itself).



```r

## Datetime: pre/post DST

anytime(c("2016-01-31 12:13:14", "2016-08-31 12:13:14"))

[1] "2016-01-31 12:13:14 CST" "2016-08-31 12:13:14 CDT"

anytime(c("2016-01-31 12:13:14", "2016-08-31 12:13:14"), tz="UTC")  # important: catches change

[1] "2016-01-31 18:13:14 UTC" "2016-08-31 17:13:14 UTC"

```



### Technical Details



The heavy lifting is done by a combination of

[Boost lexical_cast](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_70_0/doc/html/boost_lexical_cast.html) to go

from _anything_ to string representation which is then parsed by

[Boost Date_Time](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_70_0/doc/html/date_time.html).  We use the

[BH package](https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/bh.html) to access [Boost](https://www.boost.org), and

rely on [Rcpp](https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp.html) for a seamless C++ interface to and from

[R](https://www.r-project.org).



Further, as the [Boost

Date_Time](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_70_0/doc/html/date_time.html)

library cannot resolve timezones on the Windows platform (where timezone information is typically provided by R itself for its use), we offer a fallback of calling into R (via facilities from

[Rcpp](https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp.html)); see the help for

the `useR` argument for more details.



### Status



The package should work as expected.



### Example Uses



Several different [CRAN](https://cran.r-project.org)

packages import this package. Among them are the following research-focused

packages:



 - [adheRenceRX](https://cran.r-project.org/package=adheRenceRX) by Beal assesses medication adherence;

 - [AGread](https://cran.r-project.org/package=AGread) by Hibbing _et al_ which reads and transforms ActiGraph physical activity measures;

 - [cqcr](https://cran.r-project.org/package=AGread) by Odell accesses 'Care Quality Commission' data from the health and adult social care regulator for England;

 - [datadogr](https://cran.r-project.org/package=datadogr) by Yutani queries metrics from Datadog;

 - [E4tools](https://cran.r-project.org/package=E4tools) by Kleiman which reads data from Empatica wearable physiology monitors;

 - [nprcgenekeepr](https://cran.r-project.org/package=nprcgenekeepr) by Raboin _et al_ provides genetic tools for colony management ;

 - [RDS](https://cran.r-project.org/package=RDS) by Handcock _et al_ which is part of the "RDS Ananlyst" suite for analysing respondent-driven sampling data;

 - [rtsdata](https://cran.r-project.org/package=rtsdata) by RTSVizTeam manages time series data dtorage;

 - [threesixtygiving](https://cran.r-project.org/package=threesixtygiving) by Odell accesses download charitable grants from the '360Giving' Platform;

 - [tsbox](https://cran.r-project.org/package=tsbox) by Sax for format-agnostic time series data representation and conversions;

 - [tsibble](https://cran.r-project.org/package=tsibble) by Wang _et al_ for temporal data in an explicit data- and model-oriented format.



### Changes



See the NEWS.Rd file on [CRAN](https://cran.r-project.org/package=anytime/news.html) or

[GitHub](https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime/blob/master/inst/NEWS.Rd).  In particular, version 0.3.0 corrects

an overly optimistic heuristic for integer or numeric arguments and now behaves more like R itself. Specifically,

epoch offsets are interpreted as seconds for datetime objects, and days for date objects.  The prior behaviour can

be restored with an option which also be be set globally, see the help page for details.



### Installation



The package is now on [CRAN](https://cran.r-project.org) and can be installed

via a standard



```r

install.packages("anytime")

```



### Continued Testing



As we rely on the [tinytest](https://cran.r-project.org/package=tinytest) package, the

already-installed package can also be verified via



```r

tinytest::test_package("anytime")

```



at any later point.



### Contributing



Any problems, bug reports, or features requests for the package can be submitted and

handled most conveniently as [Github

issues](https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime/issues) in the repository.



Before submitting pull requests, it is frequently preferable to first discuss

need and scope in such an issue ticket.  See the file

[Contributing.md](https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp/blob/master/Contributing.md) (in the

[Rcpp](https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp) repo) for a brief discussion.



### Author



Dirk Eddelbuettel



### License



GPL (>= 2)