On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 11:26 +0100, Joris Meys wrote: > Dear, > > According to the documentation, the parameters given in "dates" are > passed to the function "chron". When trying this out, it turns out > that this apparently doesn't happen, eg: > > > dates("20100101",format="Ymd",out.format="day mon year") > [1] 01/01/10 > > chron("20100101",format="Ymd",out.format="day mon year") > [1] 01 Jan 2010
It does actually. If you read the code and/or debug `dates` to see what is happening, `out.format` is passed on to `chron` which does its thing and passes back the correctly formatted object as specified by `out.format`. However, `dates` then goes on to unclass the returned object and then stick back on a class. It also tries to preserve the "format" in the first line of `dates` fmt <- attr(x, "format") but in your example this is NULL as `x` is just a character. The code reapplies this stored format later on with attr(out, "format") <- fmt as the last line before returning out. The "format" attribute of the object returned by `chron` never gets stored or used on the object returned form `dates`. G > I would expect the outcome of both functions to be the same, or am I > overlooking something? > > Kind regards > Joris > -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel