month year specification about anytime

[davidtedfordholt]

Thank you! I appreciate it a lot.

[davidtedfordholt]

(This would address tidyverts/tsibble#142 (comment), as well as be nice for me)

[eddelbuettel]

You already have the ability to add formats. Would that be good enough?

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime::anydate("2020 September")
[1] "2020-09-01"
R> anytime::anydate("September 2020")
[1] NA
R> anytime::addFormats("%B %Y")
R> anytime::anydate("September 2020")
[1] "2020-09-01"
R> 

[eddelbuettel]

In the wider sense, I am actually surprised I support %Y %B 😀 So maybe adding %B %Y to the end of the list would indeed be easy enough and not create trouble.

[eddelbuettel]

The actual formats, if you look at them, all had a day component -- because one really neends Y and M and D to form a date as opposed to a different type you seek here, namely 'month-year' tuples.

And those work as you desire. You "just" to inject a one. September 1 2020 already passes.

[davidtedfordholt]

In the wider sense, I am actually surprised I support %Y %B 😀 So maybe adding %B %Y to the end of the list would indeed be easy enough and not create trouble.

I went in and mucked about a bit, but my C++ is nearly nonexistent, other than working with QMK, so I couldn't even figure out where %Y %B worked. Otherwise, I would have just PRed.

I have only interacted with the package through tsibble, but am suddenly thinking about all the moments back in school when this would have saved me sooo much time and headache. The use in tsibble is often to create a date from an incomplete object, but then return it to a format for whatever time period the original represented (such as yearmonth). You've nearly eradicated the worst part of data cleaning in my life!

[eddelbuettel]

It the narrowest sense it is appending here:

anytime/src/anytime.cpp

Lines 101 to 104 in 7481e69

	"%Y-%B-%d", "%Y-%B-%e",
	"%Y%B%d", "%Y%B%e",
	"%B/%d/%Y", "%B/%e/%Y",
	"%B-%d-%Y", "%B-%e-%Y"

as those are the four lines with Y% and %B -- but as I mentioned they also have %d and %e (for the days).

But as I mentioned you don't need it. Just executed anytime::addFormats("%B %Y") before you parse.