[R] day, month, year functions

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 8/17/06, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> >>>>> "Gregor" == Gregor Gorjanc <gregor.gorjanc at bfro.uni-lj.si>
> >>>>>     on Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:27:27 +0000 (UTC) writes:
>
>    Gregor> Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck <at> gmail.com> writes:
>    >>
>    >> Here are three ways:
>    >>
>    >> xx <- as.Date("2006-01-05")
>    >>
>    >> # 1. use as.POSIXlt
>    >> as.POSIXlt(xx)$mday
>    >> as.POSIXlt(xx)$mon + 1
>    >> as.POSIXlt(xx)$year + 1900
>    >>
>    >> # 2. use format
>    >> as.numeric(format(xx, "%d"))
>    >> as.numeric(format(xx, "%m"))
>    >> as.numeric(format(xx, "%Y"))
>    >>
>    >> # 3. use month.day.year in chron package
>    >> library(chron)
>    >> month.day.year(unclass(xx))$day
>    >> month.day.year(unclass(xx))$month
>    >> month.day.year(unclass(xx))$year
>
>    Gregor> Hi,
>
>    Gregor> it would really be great if there would be
>
>    Gregor> sec(), min(), hour() day(), month(), year()
>
>    Gregor> generic functions that would work on all "date" classes. Where
>    Gregor> applicable of course. I imagine that argument to get out integer
>    Gregor> or character would alse be nice.
>
> I disagree pretty strongly:
>
> - We definitely don't want min() to return minutes instead of
>  minimum !
>
> - Why pollute the namespace with 6 (well, actualy 5!) new
>  function names, when  as.POSIXlt()
>  *REALLY* is there exactly for this purpose ???
>
> I rather think the authors of each of the other old-fashioned
> "date" classes should provide as.POSIXlt() methods for their
> classes.
>
> Then, we'd have uniform interfaces, following's Gabor's "# 1."
> above.
>
> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich


There are two problems:

1. as.POSIXlt is not generic.  (This problem may not be too important
given that as.POSIXlt does handle "Date" and chron "dates" classes
already but in terms of handling all potential classes its a limitation.)

2. in the case of as.POSIXlt converting chron "dates" objects to
POSIXlt there is a time zone consideration, as shown below, where
today, August 17th in the Eastern Daylight Time zone, is displayed
as August 16th using as.POSIXlt unless we use tz = "GMT"

> library(chron)
> # today is August 17th.
> Sys.Date()
[1] "2006-08-17"
> chron(unclass(Sys.Date()))
[1] 08/17/06
> Sys.time()
[1] "2006-08-17 14:28:19 Eastern Daylight Time"
> as.POSIXlt(Sys.Date())
[1] "2006-08-17"
> as.POSIXlt(chron(unclass(Sys.Date())))
[1] "2006-08-16 20:00:00 Eastern Daylight Time"
> as.POSIXlt(chron(unclass(Sys.Date())), tz = "GMT")
[1] "2006-08-17 GMT"
> R.version.string # Windows XP
[1] "Version 2.3.1 Patched (2006-06-04 r38279)"