as.Date returning NA after setting C locale

Question

I am trying to set the C locale so that when I convert character objects to dates I don't get NA values. I got this solution from this question, but it's not working for me. When I run the first commented line,

> lct <- Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME"); Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C")

I get the following warning:

Warning message:
In readLines(outfile) :
  incomplete final line found on 'tmp/Rtmp8AJy9P/Rhttpd9742ffa74dc'
[1] "C"

Then when I try to convert a character object to date, I still get an NA of class date.

> x <- "2015-02-15"
> z <- as.Date(x, "%Y-%B-%d")
> Sys.Setlocale("LC_TIME", lct)
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"
> z
[1] NA

Does anyone know what that warning means and if it could be affecting the conversion that I run later?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 11 '16 at 19:21

1

In

> x <- "2015-02-15"
> z <- as.Date(x, "%Y-%B-%d")
> Sys.Setlocale("LC_TIME", lct)
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"
> z
[1] NA

you have the wrong format as %B stands for the textual, unabbreviated month. Witness:

R> as.Date("2015-02-15", "%Y-%m-%d")
[1] "2015-02-15"
R> as.Date("2015-February-15", "%Y-%B-%d")
[1] "2015-02-15"
R>

so I think your locale issue may be a distraction.

answered Nov 11 '16 at 19:21

Dirk Eddelbuettel

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Yep, that solved it, thank you! Pesky date formatting always messing everything up. – Jon Nov 11 '16 at 19:27
Take a good look at my (rather recent) package [anytime](http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html) which tries really hard to take the _pesky_ out by not requiring formats for dates and times. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Nov 11 '16 at 19:28
And thanks for accepting. You may also upvote (click on up-arrow). – Dirk Eddelbuettel Nov 11 '16 at 19:29

as.Date returning NA after setting C locale

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