Return localized weekdays for wday()

[alberthkcheng]

wday() always returns English names of weekdays. I made the following changes using date_names_lang in readr, to overcome this. Is there solution exists without using readr?

Also, the same applies to month.

wday.numeric <- function (x, label = FALSE, abbr = TRUE, language="en") 
{
  if (!label) 
    return(x)
  if (abbr) {
    labels <- date_names_lang(language)$day_ab
  }
  else {
    labels <- date_names_lang(language)$day
  }
  ordered(x, levels = 1:7, labels = labels)
}

wday(ymd(160408),label=TRUE,language="ko")
# [1] 금
# Levels: 일 < 월 < 화 < 수 < 목 < 금 < 토

[vspinu]

Yes. It's relatively easy to implement. This applies to month as well.

[hadley]

Where would you get the localisation databases from? I think it's better to use non-operating system sources so code works the same way across platforms.

[vspinu]

You don't need a data base. I had in mind something along the following:

> enc2utf8(unique(format(lubridate:::.date_template, format = "%a@%A")))
[1] "Thu@Thursday"  "Mon@Monday"    "Tue@Tuesday"   "Sun@Sunday"    "Fri@Friday"    "Wed@Wednesday" "Sat@Saturday" 

[hadley]

Oh, so the user would supply the localisation date names, not a language name?

[vspinu]

Yes. By default wday would return names in current locale using the trick above. The new argument locale will accept a valid locale name on user's OS, or a shortcut for 100 common languages such that wday(2, locale = "en") would also work.

[vspinu]

100 is a bit too much but a small data set of common 10-20 languages should be doable.

[hadley]

readr has 185 ;)