Intellidate

Intelligent parsing of date-time strings.

This package is inspired by the R package lubridate, and the Ruby gem stamp

Installation

This package can be installed from github using the devtools package.

require(devtools)
install_github("intellidate", "ramnathv")

Usage

intellidate provides five main functions to work with date-time strings.

1. str_to_date: converts a date string to a Date object
2. stamp: stamps a date object, given a template string
3. guess_date_format: detects all formats matching a date string
4. guess_time_format: detects the format of a time string
5. guess_datetime_format: detects all formats matching a date-time string

String to Date (str_to_date)

Converts a date string to a Date object.

str_to_date uses a set of simple heuristics to resolve the date components uniquely. If the date cannot be resolved uniquely, str_to_date uses a default ordering of month-date-year to break the ambiguity.

str_to_date("12/14/2011")        #= 2011-12-14
str_to_date("14/12/2011")        #= 2011-12-14
str_to_date("11/10/1989", 'mdy') #= 1989-11-10

Stamp (stamp)

Formats a date-time string based on a user provided template. This function is inspired by the Ruby gem stamp.

Suppose you want to stamp all your graphs based on the message template "Created on Nov 22, 2009 at 23:00 hours". You could do it with stamp by calling

now <- Sys.time() #= "2011-12-15 08:28:58 EST"
stamp("Created on Nov 22, 2009 at 23:00 hours", now)
[1] "Created on Dec 15, 2011 at 08:29 hours"

stamp("21 Aug 2011, 11:15pm", now)

Guess Date Format (guess_date_format)

Given a date string, returns all date formats that match it.

guess_date_format("Jan 1, 1999")           #= "%b %e, %Y"
guess_date_format("Sunday, May 1, 2000")   #= "%A, %B %e, %Y"
guess_date_format("Sun Aug 5")             #= "%a %b %e"
guess_date_format('20 01 89')              #= "%d %m %y"
guess_date_format('1 13 89')               #= "%m %d %y" 
guess_date_format('00/13/10')              #= "%y/%d/%m"
guess_date_format("01-01/99") #= c("%m-%d/%y", "%d-%m/%y"))
guess_date_format("12/11/00") #= c("%m/%d/%y", "%d/%m/%y"))

TODO