Another update, now at release 0.1.2, of anytime arrived at CRAN earlier today.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to either 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 0.1.2 addresses a somewhat bizarre Windows-only bug reported at GitHub in #33 and at StackOverflow. Formats of the %Y-%b-%d form, ie 2016-Dec-12 for today would fail on Windows as the contiguous string was apparently getting split by a routine looking for splits on spaces. Really strange.

Anyway, I switched to using more helper functions from the Boost String Algorithms library, and things are behaving now. An extra shoutout once more to Gábor Csárdi and the R Consortium for the most awesome R-Builder. I was able to test and fix on Windows during the weekend with no access to an actual windows environment.

The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.2 (2016-12-13)

• The (internal) string processing and splitting now uses Boost algorithm functions which avoids a (bizarre) bug on Windows.

• Test coverage was increased.

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.