<p>Another update, now at release 0.1.2, of <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html">anytime</a> arrived at <a href="https://cran.r-project.org/">CRAN</a> earlier today.</p>
<p><a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html">anytime</a> is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to either POSIXct or Date objects -- and to do so without requiring a format string.</p>
<p>See the <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html">anytime</a> page, or the <a href="https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime">GitHub README.md</a> for a few examples, or just consider the following illustration:</p>
<div><pre><code>R><span> </span><span>library</span>(anytime)
R><span> </span><span>anytime</span>(<span>&quot;20161107 202122&quot;</span>)   ## all digits
[<span>1</span>] <span>&quot;2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST&quot;</span>
R><span> </span><span>utctime</span>(<span>&quot;2016Nov07 202122&quot;</span>)  ## UTC parse example
[<span>1</span>] <span>&quot;2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST&quot;</span>
R><span> </span></code></pre></div>
<p>Release 0.1.2 addresses a somewhat bizarre Windows-only bug reported <a href="https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime/issues/33">at GitHub in #33</a> and <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41069167/is-this-a-bug-in-anytimes-anydate-function">at StackOverflow</a>. Formats of the <code>%Y-%b-%d</code> form, ie <code>2016-Dec-12</code> for today would fail on Windows as the contiguous string was apparently getting split by a routine looking for splits on spaces. Really strange.</p>
<p>Anyway, I switched to using more helper functions from the <a href="http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_62_0/doc/html/string_algo.html">Boost String Algorithms</a> library, and things are behaving now. An extra shoutout once more to <a href="http://gaborcsardi.org/">Gábor Csárdi</a> and the <a href="https://www.r-consortium.org/">R Consortium</a> for the most awesome <a href="https://builder.r-hub.io/">R-Builder</a>. I was able to test and fix on Windows during the weekend with no access to an actual windows environment.</p>
<p>The <code>NEWS</code> file summarises the release:</p>
<blockquote>
<h4>Changes in anytime version 0.1.2 (2016-12-13)</h4>
<ul><li><p>The (internal) string processing and splitting now uses Boost algorithm functions which avoids a (bizarre) bug on Windows.</p></li>
<li><p>Test coverage was increased.</p></li>
</ul></blockquote>
<p>Courtesy of <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/">CRANberries</a>, there is a comparison to <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/2016/12/13#anytime_0.1.2">the previous release</a>. More information is on the <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html">anytime</a> page.</p>
<p>For questions or comments use the <a href="https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime/issues">issue tracker</a> off the <a href="https://github.com/eddelbuettel/anytime">GitHub repo</a>.</p>
<p>
This post by <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/">Dirk Eddelbuettel</a> originated on his <a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/">Thinking inside the box</a> blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
</p><p>