On Dec 13, 2012, at 1:43 PM, Tobias Gauster wrote:

Hi,

I encountered the behavior, that the duplicated method for data.frames gives "false positives" if there are columns of class POSIXct with a clock shift from DST to standard time.

time <- as.POSIXct("2012-10-28 02:00", tz="Europe/Vienna") + c(0, 60*60)
time
[1] "2012-10-28 02:00:00 CEST" "2012-10-28 02:00:00 CET"

df <- data.frame(time, text="foo")
duplicated(df)
[1] FALSE  TRUE

In this instance

This is because the timezone is lost after calling paste():
do.call(paste, c(df, sep = "\r"))

I suspect the problem arise when 'paste' coerces to character:

> as.character(time)
[1] "2012-10-28 02:00:00" "2012-10-28 02:00:00"

I think that as.character might get missed since the 'paste' operation is done internally.

> as.character(time, usetz=TRUE)
[1] "2012-10-28 02:00:00 CEST" "2012-10-28 02:00:00 CET"


--
David.


[1] "2012-10-28 02:00:00\rfoo" "2012-10-28 02:00:00\rfoo"



I can't really figure out if this behavior is desired or not. If so, a short warning in ?duplicated could be helpful. It is mentioned how duplicated.data.frame() works, but I didn't find a hint to properly handle POSIXct-objects.

There is no duplicated.POSIXct method

My particular problem was to cast a data.frame like this one with cast() (which calls reshape1(), which calls duplicated()):

df2 <- data.frame(time, time1=as.numeric(time),
                 lab=rep(1:3, each=2), value=101:106,
                 text=rep(c("foo", "bar"), each=3))

library(reshape2)

Using the column of class POSIXct as a variable in the formula gives:
cast(lab*time~text, data=df2, value="value")
Aggregation requires fun.aggregate: length used as default
 lab                time bar foo
1   1 2012-10-28 02:00:00   0   2
2   2 2012-10-28 02:00:00   1   1
3   3 2012-10-28 02:00:00   2   0

Converting to numeric, casting and converting back works as expected, although the timezone is not visible, because print.data.frame() calls format.POSIXct() with, usetz = FALSE:
y <- cast(lab*time1~text, data=df2, value="value")
y$time1 <- as.POSIXct("1970-01-01 01:00") + as.numeric(y$time1)

Can anyone suggest a more elegant solution?

Best,
Tobias

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Reply via email to