[Rd] dates (PR#7008)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

R-bugs is for bugs, and one bug per report.  That means it cannot cope 
with three-part reports, two parts of which seem to be questions/wishes.

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 gilescrane at doh.state.nj.us wrote:

> Full_Name: Giles L Crane
> Version: 1.9.0
> OS: Windows 98
> Submission from: (NULL) (199.20.71.17)
> 
> 
> In package foreign, the read.epiinfo() does not
> read dates properly.  
> (1) In reading a dataset,
> read.epiinfo made many dates NA.

Can you give a reproducible example, please.  Please start a new topic 
with a comprehensive subject line, as this one has been closed.

> (2) Instead of reading dates to a POSIXct format,
> why not read to a mm/dd/yyyy format such as 
> "06/22/2004"?
> As you may know, EPI6 calculates and displays
> dates quite directly.

R does not use that date format (which is not an international standard).
Indeed, how does anyone know that is a date (and if "01/01/1989", that it 
is in the illogical mm/dd/yyyy format only used in a few countries).

> (3) The package date does not seem to have
> a convenient way of extracting dates
> from POSIXct format.

Well, the date package was written about a decade before POSIXct.  Why 
would anyone still be using it for new data?  (Such a person could easily 
write one for his/her own use.)

> Appreciate any comments,

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595