anytime 0.3.7

A fresh minor release of the anytime package is arriving on CRAN right now. This is the eighteenth release, and it comes roughly five months after the previous showing the relative feature-stability we have now.

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 clever new option, thanks to Stephen Froehlich. If you know your input has (lots) of duplicates you can now say so and anytime() (and the other entry points for times and dates, UTC or not) will only parse the unique entries leading to potentially rather large speed gains (as in Stephen’s case where he often has more than 95% of the data as duplicates). We also tweaked the test setup some more, but as we are still unable to replicate what is happening with the Fedora test boxen at CRAN due to the non-reproducible setup so this remains a bit of guess work. Lastly, I am making use of a new Rcpp #define to speed up compilation a little bit too.

The full list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.7 (2019-01-20)

• Test and possibly condition away one more test file.

• Small enhancement for compilation by setting no-rtti define via Rcpp.

• New option calcUnique for speed-up by parseing only unique timestamps (Stephen Froehlich in #110 fixing #109).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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