On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Mark Wardle wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> The as.Date() function appears to give different results depending on
> the order of the vector passed into it.
>
> d1 = c("1900-01-01", "2007-01-01","","2001-05-03")
> d2 = c("", "1900-01-01", "2007-01-01","2001-05-03")
> as.Date(d1) # gives correct results
> as.Date(d2) # fails with error (* see below)
>
> This problem does not arise if the dates are NA rather than an empty
> string, but my data is coming via RODBC and I still don't have NAs
> passed across properly.
>
> I might add that I initially noticed this behaviour when using RODBC's
> sqlQuery() function call, and I initially had difficulty explaining why
> one column of dates was passed correctly, but another failed. The
> failing column was a "date of death" column where it was NA ("") for
> most patients.
>
> I've come up with two workarounds that work. The first is to sort the
> data at the SQL level, ensuring the initial record is not null. The
> second is to use sqlQuery() with as.is=T option, and then do the sorting
> and conversion afterwards.
>
> Is the behaviour of as.Date() shown above as expected/designed?
Yes. It uses the first non-NA string to choose the format *if you do not
specify it*.
The correct work-around is to get non-valid strings returned as NA, not
"". That is argument 'na.strings' in RODBC (and elsewhere: read.table
behaves in the same way).
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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