A new minor release of the anytime package is now on CRAN. This is the twelveth release, and the first in a little over a year as the package has stabilized.

anytime 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. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples.

This release adds a few minor tweaks. For numeric input, the function is now immutable: arguments that are not already cast to a different type (a common use case) are now cloned so that the input is never changed. We also added two assertion helpers for dates and datetimes, a new formatting helper for the (arguably awful, but common) ‘yyyymmdd’ format, and expanded some unit tests.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.1 (2017-06-05)

• Numeric input is now preserved rather than silently cast to the return object type (#69 fixing #68).

• New assertion function assertDate() and assertTime().

• Unit tests were expanded for the new functions, for conversion from integer as well as for yyyymmdd().

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page.

For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.