Convert Period to numeric

[etiennebr]

I couldn't find the right way to do it, but it seems hard to convert Period elements to numeric.
This is the expected behavior (as.numeric on difftime)

as.numeric(as.difftime("24:00:00"), "hours")
# [1] 24
as.numeric(as.difftime("24:00:00"), "mins")
# [1] 1440

However Period objects only return the unitpart of the Period, like components getters (second, minute, ... )

as.numeric(period(24, "hours"), "mins")
# [1] 0  # This is unexpected to me, I believe it's an error
as.numeric(period(24, "hours") + period(10, "minutes"), "mins")
# [1] 10
as.numeric(period(24, "hours"), "hours")
# [1] 24

The trick I found was to convert to duration, but I get a warning when converting Period to duration.

as.numeric(as.duration(period(10, "minutes")), "mins")
# estimate only: convert periods to intervals for accuracy
# [1] 10
as.numeric(as.duration(period(10, "minutes")), "hours")
# estimate only: convert periods to intervals for accuracy
# [1] 0.1666667

[etiennebr]

Ok, I found time_length as the equivalent of as.numeric(as.duration()), but it still raises a warning.

Stepping through the function, it works like a component getter. Shouldn't the behavior be similar to a Duration object ?

I'm slightly confused between duration and period, but it's so convenient to use minutes(20) and it happens to return a period. Would it be possible to raise the coercion warning only when there actually is a loss of precision ? I think it's also unexpected that these two objects have different behaviors.

[vspinu]

Sorry for coming late on this.

Periods don't have a predefined length, hence the warning.

Would it be possible to raise the coercion warning only when there actually is a loss of precision ?

Yes. This makes sense indeed.

[vspinu]

as.numeric(period(24, "hours"), "mins")

[1] 0 # This is unexpected to me, I believe it's an error

This behavior is undocumented but I agree that it doesn't make sense.

[vspinu]

BTW, there is period_to_seconds to convert to seconds without a warning. Checking if period could be converted exactly to specified unit would require checking if all components higher than day are zero and would introduce unnecessary inneficiency. So I am inclined to keep the warning as it is. But I will try to fix the as.numeric part.

[vspinu]

Fixing as.numeric and also removing all other estimate only warnings. Those are annoying, often unnecessary (units smaller/equal to days) and are deemed common knowledge by now.

Let me know if you see more problems of this kind. Thanks.

[vspinu]

One last thing. No need to sum up peridos. You can produce those in one go:

per <- period(hours = 10, minutes = 6)
as.numeric(per, "hours")
# [1] 10.1

[etiennebr]

Great @vspinu, and many thanks for the period tip !