coerce_to: Coercion from common date classes to 'mdate'

In messydates: A Flexible Class for Messy Dates

Coercion from common date classes to mdate

Description

These methods coerce various date classes into the mdate class. They represent the main user-facing class-creating functions in the package. In addition to the typical date classes in R (Date, POSIXct, and POSIXlt), there is also a direct method for converting text or character strings to mdate. The function can also extract dates and times from text, including some historical prose conventions, though this is a work-in-progress and currently only works in English.

Usage

as_messydate(x, resequence = FALSE)

## S3 method for class 'Date'
as_messydate(x, resequence = FALSE)

## S3 method for class 'POSIXct'
as_messydate(x, resequence = FALSE)

## S3 method for class 'POSIXlt'
as_messydate(x, resequence = FALSE)

## S3 method for class 'character'
as_messydate(x, resequence = NULL)

## S3 method for class 'numeric'
as_messydate(x, resequence = NULL)

## S3 method for class 'list'
as_messydate(x, resequence = FALSE)

mdate(x, resequence = FALSE)

Arguments

x

A scalar or vector of a class that can be coerced into mdate, such as Date, POSIXct, POSIXlt, or character.

resequence

Users have the option to choose the order for ambiguous dates with or without separators (e.g. "11-01-12" or "20112112"). NULL by default. Other options include: 'dmy', 'ymd', 'mdy', 'ym', 'my' and 'interactive' If 'dmy', dates are converted from DDMMYY format for 6 digit dates, or DDMMYYYY format for 8 digit dates. If 'ymd', dates are converted from YYMMDD format for 6 digit dates, or YYYYMMDD format for 8 digit dates. If 'mdy', dates are converted from MMDDYY format for 6 digit dates or MMDDYYYY format for 8 digit dates. For these three options, ambiguous dates are converted to YY-MM-DD format for 6 digit dates, or YYYY-MM-DD format for 8 digit dates. If 'my', ambiguous 6 digit dates are converted from MM-YYYY format to YYYY-MM. If 'ym', ambiguous 6 digit dates are converted to YYYY-MM format. If 'interactive', it prompts users to select the existing component order of ambiguous dates, based on which the date is reordered into YYYY-MM-DD format and further completed to YYYY-MM-DD format if they choose to do so.

Details

Coercion from POSIXct and POSIXlt preserves the time of day (and UTC offset) as an ISO 8601-2 date-time. Times of exactly midnight (00:00:00) are treated as date-only, so that timezone-naive dates round-trip unchanged.

Value

A mdate class object

Functions

• as_messydate(): Core mdate class coercion function

• as_messydate(Date): Coerce from Date to mdate class

• as_messydate(POSIXct): Coerce from POSIXct to mdate class

• as_messydate(POSIXlt): Coerce from POSIXlt to mdate class

• as_messydate(character): Coerce character date objects to mdate class

• as_messydate(numeric): Coerce numeric objects to mdate class

• as_messydate(list): Coerce list date objects to the most concise representation of mdate class

Parsing prose

Beyond plain and lightly-formatted dates, as_messydate() recognises several conventions common in e.g. historical texts and converts them to their ISO 8601-2 equivalent before the usual parsing takes place:

• Roman numerals for a bare year, e.g. "MDCCLXXVI" becomes 1776.

• Roman calendar references, i.e. the Kalends, Nones, and Ides of a named month, e.g. "the Ides of March, 44 BC" becomes "-0044-03-15". The Nones and Ides fall later (the 7th and 15th) in March, May, July, and October, and earlier (the 5th and 13th) in other months.

• Approximate qualifiers ("around", "circa", "about", "roughly", ...) add the ~ annotation, and uncertain qualifiers ("possibly", "perhaps", "reportedly", ...) add ⁠?⁠; both together add ⁠%⁠, e.g. "possibly about 1910" becomes "%1910".

• Connectives joining two days of the same month: "between the 13th and 15th" or "from the 13th to the 15th" become a range (..); "the 13th or the 15th" becomes a set ({}); and a plain "the 13th and the 15th" becomes two separate dates.

• "before"/"prior to"/"no later than" and "after"/"since"/"no earlier than" become an open range, e.g. "before 1910" becomes "..1910". The bound may itself be any precision the parser understands, including a decade or century.

• Decades ("the 1920s" becomes "192X") and centuries ("the 19th century" becomes "18XX").

• A comma-separated list of dates in prose, e.g. "13th Feb, 1977, Feb 15 1977, 1910", is split into separate dates (here, three): a fragment that is only a year is treated as completing the date before it.

See Also

Other coerce: coerce_from

Examples

as_messydate("2021")
as_messydate("2021-02")
as_messydate("2021-02-01")
as_messydate("01-02-2021")
as_messydate("1 February 2021")
as_messydate("First of February, two thousand and twenty-one")
as_messydate("2021-02-01?")
as_messydate("2021-02-01~")
as_messydate("2021-02-01%")
as_messydate("2021-02-01..2021-02-28")
as_messydate("{2021-02-01,2021-02-28}")
as_messydate(c("-2021", "2021 BC", "-2021-02-01"))
as_messydate(c("210201", "20210201"), resequence = "ymd")
as_messydate(c("010221", "01022021"), resequence = "dmy")
# as_messydate(c("01-02-21", "01-02-2021", "01-02-91", "01-02-1991"),
# resequence = "interactive")
# ISO 8601-2 times, with the same annotations available on time components
as_messydate("2019-03-01 14:30:00Z")
as_messydate("2019-03-01 2:30pm")
as_messydate("2019-03-01 ~14:30")
# a time of day may also be given on its own, with no date part
as_messydate("2:30pm")
as_messydate("around 2pm")
# historical prose (see the "Parsing historical prose" section below)
as_messydate("MDCCLXXVI")
as_messydate("the Ides of March, 44 BC")
as_messydate("possibly about 1910")
as_messydate("the 1920s")
as_messydate("the 19th century")
as_messydate("before 1910")
as_messydate("between the 13th and 15th of Feb, 1977")
as_messydate(list(c("2012-06-01", "2012-06-02", "2012-06-03")))
as_messydate(list(c("2012-06-01", "2012-06-02", "2012-06-03",
"{2012-06-01, 2012-06-02, 2012-06-03}", "2012-06-01", "2012-06-03")))

messydates documentation built on July 17, 2026, 1:07 a.m.