A tiny nit-pick nit-pick: I'd take NA to mean the finish date is missing
and you know neither whether the event has finished or if it has
finished at all :-)
Either way the proposed method seems sensible.
Tim
On 28/04/2023 16:29, Paul McQuesten wrote:
A tiny nit-pick: Seems to me that end date = NA would mean the event has
not yet ended, whilst Inf would mean that the event is known to never
terminate, ie: an eternal fact, or physical law.
On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 10:12 AM Davis Vaughan via R-devel <
r-devel@r-project.org> wrote:
Hi all,
I noticed that `range.default()` has a nice `finite = TRUE` argument,
but it doesn't actually apply to Date or POSIXct due to how
`is.numeric()` works.
```
x <- .Date(c(0, Inf, 1, 2, Inf))
x
#> [1] "1970-01-01" "Inf" "1970-01-02" "1970-01-03" "Inf"
# Darn!
range(x, finite = TRUE)
#> [1] "1970-01-01" "Inf"
# What I want
.Date(range(unclass(x), finite = TRUE))
#> [1] "1970-01-01" "1970-01-03"
```
I think `finite = TRUE` would be pretty nice for Dates in particular.
As a motivating example, sometimes you have ranges of dates
represented by start/end pairs. It is fairly natural to represent an
event that hasn't ended yet with an infinite date. If you need to then
compute a sequence of dates spanning the full range of the start/end
pairs, it would be nice to be able to use `range(finite = TRUE)` to do
so:
```
start <- as.Date(c("2019-01-05", "2019-01-10", "2019-01-11", "2019-01-14"))
end <- as.Date(c("2019-01-07", NA, "2019-01-14", NA))
end[is.na(end)] <- Inf
# `end = Inf` means that the event hasn't "ended" yet
data.frame(start, end)
#> start end
#> 1 2019-01-05 2019-01-07
#> 2 2019-01-10 Inf
#> 3 2019-01-11 2019-01-14
#> 4 2019-01-14 Inf
# Create a full sequence along all days in start/end
range <- .Date(range(unclass(c(start, end)), finite = TRUE))
seq(range[1], range[2], by = 1)
#> [1] "2019-01-05" "2019-01-06" "2019-01-07" "2019-01-08" "2019-01-09"
#> [6] "2019-01-10" "2019-01-11" "2019-01-12" "2019-01-13" "2019-01-14"
```
It seems like one option is to create a `range.Date()` method that
unclasses, forwards the arguments on to a second call to `range()`,
and then reclasses?
```
range.Date <- function(x, ..., na.rm = FALSE, finite = FALSE) {
.Date(range(unclass(x), na.rm = na.rm, finite = finite), oldClass(x))
}
```
This is similar to how `rep.Date()` works.
Thanks,
Davis Vaughan
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