R: Balancing "Ragged" and Out-of-range POSIXlt Date-Times

balancePOSIXlt {base}

R Documentation

Balancing “Ragged” and Out-of-range POSIXlt Date-Times

Description

Utilities to ‘balance’ objects of class "POSIXlt".

unCfillPOSIXlt(x) is a fast primitive version of balancePOSIXlt(x, fill.only=TRUE, classed=FALSE) or equivalently, unclass(balancePOSIXlt(x, fill.only=TRUE)) from where it is named.

Usage

balancePOSIXlt(x, fill.only = FALSE, classed = TRUE)
unCfillPOSIXlt(x)

Arguments

x

an R object inheriting from "POSIXlt", see POSIXlt.

fill.only

a logical specifying if balancePOSIXlt(x, ..) should only “fill up” by recycling, but not re-check validity nor recompute, e.g., x$wday and x$yday.

classed

a logical specifying if the result should be classed, true by default. Using balancePOSIXlt(x, classed = FALSE) is equivalent to but faster than unclass(balancePOSIXlt(x)).

“Ragged” and Out-of-range vs “Balanced” POSIXlt

Note that "POSIXlt" objects x may have their (9 to 11) list components of different lengths, by simply recycling them to full length. Prior to R 4.3.0, this has worked in printing, formatting, and conversion to "POSIXct", but often not for length(), conversion to "Date" or indexing, i.e., subsetting, [, or subassigning, [<-.

Relatedly, components sec, min, hour, mday and mon could have been out of their designated range (say, 0–23 for hours) and still work correctly, e.g. in conversions and printing. This is supported as well, since R 4.3.0, at least when the values are not extreme.

Function balancePOSIXlt(x) will now return a version of the "POSIXlt" object x which by default is balanced in both ways: All the internal list components are of full length, and their values are inside their ranges as specified in as.POSIXlt's ‘Details on POSIXlt’. Setting fill.only = TRUE will only recycle the list components to full length, but not check them at all. This is particularly faster when all components of x are already of full length.

Experimentally, balancePOSIXlt() and other functions returning POSIXlt objects now set a logical attribute "balanced" with NA meaning “filled-in”, i.e., not “ragged” and TRUE means (fully) balanced.

Examples

## FIXME: this should also work for regular (non-UTC) time zones.
TZ <-"UTC"
# Could be
# d1 <- as.POSIXlt("2000-01-02 3:45", tz = TZ)
# on systems (almost all) which have tm_zone.
oldTZ <- Sys.getenv('TZ', unset = "unset")
Sys.setenv(TZ = "UTC")
d1 <- as.POSIXlt("2000-01-02 3:45")
d1$min <- d1$min + (0:16)*20L
(f1 <- format(d1))
str(unclass(d1))      # only $min is of length > 1
df <- balancePOSIXlt(d1, fill.only = TRUE) # a "POSIXlt" object
str(unclass(df))      # all of length 17; 'min' unchanged
db <- balancePOSIXlt(d1, classed = FALSE)  # a list
stopifnot(identical(
    unCfillPOSIXlt(d1),
    balancePOSIXlt(d1, fill.only = TRUE, classed = FALSE)))
str(db) # of length 17 *and* in range

if(oldTZ == "unset") Sys.unsetenv('TZ') else Sys.setenv(TZ = oldTZ)