A new version of the anytime package is now on CRAN. It marks the eleventh release since the inaugural version late last summer.

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 release brings a little more consistency to how numeric or integer arguments are handled. Previously, we were overly eager in accepting something such as 20150605 (i.e. today) as a (numerical or integer) input to both anytime() and anydate(). That is well-intentioned, but ultimately foolish. We relied on heuristic cutoffs to determine whether input was “meant to be” a date or time offset. There lies madness. We now differentiate whether we were called via anytime() (in which case numerical data is second offset to the epoch, just as.POSICct()) or anytime() (in which case it is days offset to the (date) epoch, just like as.Date()). The previous behaviour can be restored via a options, both function-local as well as global are supported. And of course, there is no change for all other (and more common) input formats, notably character or factor. A full list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.0 (2017-06-05)

• Numeric input is now always an offset to epoch, with anytime() using seconds, and anydate() using dates. (#65 fixing #63).

• Old behaviour can be re-enabled with an option also supporting a global setting getOption("anytimeOldHeuristic")

• RStudio versions 1.1.129 or later can run all functions without fear of crashing due to a change in their use of Boost.

• Replaced init.c with registration code inside of RcppExports.cpp thanks to Rcpp 0.12.11.

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.