An updated anytime package arrived at CRAN yesterday. This is release number nine, and the first with a little gap to the prior release on Christmas Eve as the features are stabilizing, as is the implementation.

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.

This releases addresses two small things related to the anydate() and utcdate() conversion (see below) and adds one nice new format, besides some internal changes detailed below:

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("Thu Sep 01 10:11:12 CDT 2016")
[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12 CDT"
R> anytime("Thu Sep 01 10:11:12.123456 CDT 2016") # with frac. seconds
[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12.123456 CDT"
R> 

Of course, all commands are also fully vectorised. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for more examples.

Changes in anytime version 0.2.1 (2017-02-09)

• The new DatetimeVector class from Rcpp is now used, and proper versioned Depends: have been added (#43)

• The anydate and utcdate functions convert again from factor and ordered (#46 closing #44)

• A format similar to RFC 28122 but with additonal timezone text can now be parsed (#48 closing #47)

• Conversion from POSIXt to Date now also respect the timezone (#50 closing #49)

• The internal .onLoad functions was updated

• The Travis setup uses https to fetch the run script

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.