Dates before the epoch cause R to crash

[FarrelBuch]

In my data set I had a date of birth that was before January 1, 1970. It crashed Rstudio and R. It took me a long time to find out what was going on.

I don't really know what an epoch is in software but I know that anytime can't handle <1970-01-01

library (anytime)  
anydate("10/20/1970")
anydate("01/01/1970")
anydate("12/01/1969")

The first two work as expected. The last line crashes R

[eddelbuettel]

Thanks, I'll look into that.

[eddelbuettel]

What is your OS? On Linux, I get

edd@max:~$ r -l anytime -p -e 'anydate(c("10/20/1970", "01/01/1970", "12/01/1969", "12/13/2014"))'
[1] "1970-10-20" "1970-01-01" "1969-12-01" "2014-12-13"
edd@max:~$ 
edd@max:~$ Rscript -e 'library(anytime); anydate(c("10/20/1970", "01/01/1970", "12/01/1969", "12/13/2014"))'
[1] "1970-10-20" "1970-01-01" "1969-12-01" "2014-12-13"
edd@max:~$ 

[FarrelBuch]

Windows 8

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016, 20:35 Dirk Eddelbuettel notifications@github.com
wrote:

What is your OS? On Linux, I get

edd@max:$ r -l anytime -p -e 'anydate(c("10/20/1970", "01/01/1970", "12/01/1969", "12/13/2014"))'
[1] "1970-10-20" "1970-01-01" "1969-12-01" "2014-12-13"
edd@max:$
edd@max:$ Rscript -e 'library(anytime); anydate(c("10/20/1970", "01/01/1970", "12/01/1969", "12/13/2014"))'
[1] "1970-10-20" "1970-01-01" "1969-12-01" "2014-12-13"
edd@max:$

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Farrel Buchinsky
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[eddelbuettel]

Can you build from source, ie test the GitHub version? It has a simpler test function:

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime:::testFormat("%m/%d/%Y", "12/01/1969")
[1] "1969-12-01 CST"
R> as.numeric(anytime:::testFormat("%m/%d/%Y", "12/01/1969"))
[1] -2656800
R> 

We could add some print statements to see what is going on there.

[FarrelBuch]

Yes, I will try to do that. In the meantime, I tried these statements in Rgui on my computer at home which is running the most recent version of Windows 10 Pro (10.0.14393 build 14393)

> library(anytime)
> anydate("2/18/2003")
[1] "2003-02-18"
> anydate("1/1/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/2/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/2/1971")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/13/1971")
[1] "1971-01-13"
> anydate("1/13/1970")
[1] "1970-01-13"
> anydate("1/12/1970")
[1] "1970-01-12"
> anydate("1/11/1970")
[1] "1970-01-11"
> anydate("1/10/1970")
[1] "1970-01-10"
> anydate("1/9/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/19/1970")
[1] "1970-01-19"
> getRversion()
[1] ‘3.3.1’

anydate("1/19/1969") crashed the program

[FarrelBuch]

OK. I built from source

I still get the crash.
I tried anytime:::testFormat("%m/%d/%Y", "12/01/1969") and it too resulted in "R Session Aborted"

Here is my console output to demonstrate that I did what I think I did.

> library(devtools)
> devtools::install_github("eddelbuettel/anytime")
Downloading GitHub repo eddelbuettel/anytime@master
from URL https://api.github.com/repos/eddelbuettel/anytime/zipball/master
Installing anytime
"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/bin/x64/R" --no-site-file --no-environ --no-save --no-restore --quiet CMD INSTALL  \
  "C:/Users********AppData/Local/Temp/Rtmpsv6DVB/devtools393814996c3a/eddelbuettel-anytime-c87d743" --library="G:/Farrel  \
  Data/Documents/R/win-library/3.3" --install-tests 

* installing *source* package 'anytime' ...
** libs

*** arch - i386
c:/Rtools/mingw_32/bin/g++  -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG    -I"G:*********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/Rcpp/include" -I"G*********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/BH/include" -I"d:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/include"     -O2 -Wall  -mtune=core2 -c RcppExports.cpp -o RcppExports.o
c:/Rtools/mingw_32/bin/g++  -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG    -I"G**********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/Rcpp/include" -I"G***********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/BH/include" -I"d:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/include"     -O2 -Wall  -mtune=core2 -c anytime.cpp -o anytime.o
c:/Rtools/mingw_32/bin/g++ -shared -s -static-libgcc -o anytime.dll tmp.def RcppExports.o anytime.o -Ld:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/lib/i386 -Ld:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/lib -LC:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/bin/i386 -lR
installing to G**********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/anytime/libs/i386

*** arch - x64
c:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/g++  -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG    -I"G***********Documents/R/win-library/3.3/Rcpp/include" -I"G*********************Documents/R/win-library/3.3/BH/include" -I"d:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/include"     -O2 -Wall  -mtune=core2 -c RcppExports.cpp -o RcppExports.o
c:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/g++  -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG    -I"G******************Documents/R/win-library/3.3/Rcpp/include" -I"G****************Documents/R/win-library/3.3/BH/include" -I"d:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/include"     -O2 -Wall  -mtune=core2 -c anytime.cpp -o anytime.o
c:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/g++ -shared -s -static-libgcc -o anytime.dll tmp.def RcppExports.o anytime.o -Ld:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/lib/x64 -Ld:/Compiler/gcc-4.9.3/local330/lib -LC:/PROGRA~1/R/R-33~1.1/bin/x64 -lR
installing to G**************Documents/R/win-library/3.3/anytime/libs/x64
** R
** inst
** tests
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded
*** arch - i386
*** arch - x64
* DONE (anytime)
> library(anytime)
> anydate("2/18/2003")
[1] "2003-02-18"
> anydate("1/1/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/2/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/2/1971")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/13/1971")
[1] "1971-01-13"
> anydate("1/13/1970")
[1] "1970-01-13"
> anydate("1/12/1970")
[1] "1970-01-12"
> anydate("1/11/1970")
[1] "1970-01-11"
> anydate("1/10/1970")
[1] "1970-01-10"
> anydate("1/9/1970")
[1] NA
> anydate("1/19/1970")
[1] "1970-01-19"
> getRversion()
[1] ‘3.3.1’
> package_version(x = "anytime")
Error: invalid version specification ‘anytime’

And then when I entered anydate("1/19/1969") everything crashed.

Is there anyway I can help troubleshoot?

[eddelbuettel]

Thank you for looking into this! I won't have access to my windows vw til Monday.

Yes, I think adding print statements along the way is a start. Something like this, maybe, in that function:

// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::NumericVector testFormat(const std::string fmt, const std::string s, const std::string tz = "") {

    bt::ptime pt, ptbase;

    std::istringstream is(s);
    std::locale loc = std::locale(std::locale::classic(), new bt::time_input_facet(fmt));

    Rprintf("before imbue\n");
    is.imbue(loc);
    Rprintf("before parse\n");
    is >> pt;
    Rprintf("after parse\n");

    double timeval = (pt == ptbase) ? NAN : ptToDouble(pt);

    Rcpp::NumericVector pv(1);
    pv(0) = timeval;
    pv.attr("class") = Rcpp::CharacterVector::create("POSIXct", "POSIXt");
    pv.attr("tzone") = tz;

    return pv;
}

(That would require replacing the function in git, so you'd need a tarball or zip of the current source first. If you'd rather use devtools from a branch I can commit this too.)

This is starting to look like an issue in Boost on Windows as we do little code here. Or it is a bug I am not seeing -- maybe the Rprintf() above will help. I suspect it is crashing in is >> pt when parsing the string.

[eddelbuettel]

I found the issue. This line does not work on Windows for dates before 1970 -- the tm_isdt access creates the segfault. Weird.