anytime: Anything to 'POSIXct' or 'Date' Converter

title: 'anytime: Anything to Datetime or Date Converter' tags: - R - date - datetime - conversion authors: - name: Dirk Eddelbuettel orcid: 0000-0001-6419-907X affiliation: 1 affiliations: - name: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign index: 1 date: 28 July 2019 bibliography: paper.bib

Summary

R excels at computing with dates, and times. Using a typed representation for data is highly recommended not only because of the functionality offered, but also because of the added safety stemming from proper representation.

But no create date or datetime types, there is often a small nuisance cost in interactive work as well as in programming. Users must specify an 'origin' for the as.POSIXct() function when using a numeric argument, or a default format string when passing a character argument to strptime(). Similar, inputs in a different type have to be converted to conform to either numeric or character.

The anytime() function from the eponymous packages offers a more powerful alternative. If needed, it first carefully converts the input data to conform to the requirements and then relies on the Boost date_time parser in a heuristic search over a large-enough variety of potential inputs formats to automatically convert from a wide variety of input formats to appropriately convert to a datetime object -- or, in the case of anydate(), to a date object.

The Rcpp package [@TAS:Rcpp;@CRAN:Rcpp] provides the underlying C++ and R integration, and the BH package [@CRAN:BH] supplies the Boost library utilised. The anytime package [@CRAN:anytime] integrates both to offer date and datetime conversions that are at the same time fast (using underlying C++ code) and easy to use (automatic conversion, no required formats). It has been on the CRAN network since 2016, and currently averages approximately 16k downloads per month.