CRAN just accepted the newest release 0.1.1 of anytime, following the previous five releases since September.

anytime is a very focussed package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to POSIXct (or Date) objects — and to do so without requiring a format string.

See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples, or just consider the following illustration:

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("20161107 202122")   ## all digits
[1] "2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST"
R> utctime("2016Nov07 202122")  ## UTC parse example
[1] "2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST"
R> 

Release 0.1.1 robustifies two aspects. The ‘digits only’ input above extends what Boost Date_Time can parse and relies on simple-enough pre-processing. This operation is now more robust. We also ensure that input already of class Date is simply passed through by anydate() or utcdate(). Last but not least we added code coverage support, which oh-so-predictably lead us to game this metric to reach the elusive 100% coverage.

The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.1 (2016-11-27)

• Both anydate() and utcdate() no longer attempt to convert an input value that is already of type Date.

• The string splitter (needed for the ‘all-digits’ formats extending Boost Date_time) is now more defensive about the input argument and more robust. Thanks to Bob Jansen for the heads-up (PR #30 closing issue #29).

• Code coverage reporting has been added (PR #31).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page.

For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.