A new small package with a new C++ header library is now on CRAN. It brings the date library by Howard Hinnant to R. This library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11/C++14/C++17 what will be (with minor modifications) the ‘date’ library in C++20. I had been aware of it for a while, but not needed thanks to CCTZ library out of Google and our RcppCCTZ package. And like CCTZ, it builds upon std::chron adding a whole lot of functionality and useability enhancement. But a some upcoming (and quite exciting!) changes in nanotime required it, I had a reason to set about packaging it as RcppDate. And after a few days of gestation and review it is now available via CRAN.

Two simple example files are included and can be accessed by Rcpp::sourceCpp(). Some brief excerpts follow.

The first example shows three date constructors. Note how the month (and the leading digits) are literals. No quotes for strings anywhere. And no format (just like our anytime package for R).

  constexpr auto x1 = 2015_y/March/22;
  constexpr auto x2 = March/22/2015;
  constexpr auto x3 = 22_d/March/2015;

Note that these are constexpr that resolve at compile-time, and that the resulting year_month_day type is inferred via auto.

A second example constructs the last day of the months similarly:

  constexpr auto x1 = 2015_y/February/last;
  constexpr auto x2 = February/last/2015;
  constexpr auto x3 = last/February/2015;

For more, see the copious date.h documentation.

The (very bland first) NEWS entry (from a since-added NEWS file) for the initial upload follows.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2020-01-17)

• Initial CRAN upload of first version

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.