Anytime errors with length 1 NA about anytime

[robitalec]

Yes - very marginal. I appreciate your help with it.

Thank you!

[eddelbuettel]

My pleasure -- thanks for catching that! A clearly uncovered condition, even after all those years. I guess I must have felt that a three-valued logical would never come in but what did I know :)

[eddelbuettel]

Thanks for the kind words.

Cases 1 and 3 are, not to put too fine a comb on it, "garbage" as there is nothing to parse. The answer is even consistent and the same: an error.

What were you expecting here? Something like this:

> as.POSIXct(NA_real_)
[1] NA
> class(as.POSIXct(NA_real_))
[1] "POSIXct" "POSIXt" 
> 
> as.Date(NA_real_)
[1] NA
> class(as.Date(NA_real_))
[1] "Date"
> 

Isn't aborting in error better than silently returning NAs?

[eddelbuettel]

Also, looking at the code and recognising that you it branches on type it makes it a little more like an error on your end for not supplying a type:

> library(anytime)
> anytime(as.character(NA))
[1] NA
> anytime(as.numeric(NA))
[1] NA
>

I can look into making the final 'default case' more informative. The main culprit, for now, is

> class(NA)
[1] "logical"
> 

and I presume it is my error for not responding more plainly to logical input. I can fix that.

[robitalec]

Isn't aborting in error better than silently returning NAs?

I would agree this is often the case.

I opened the issue because it felt like NAs were being treated differently, dependent from my understanding on if there was at least something valid provided to anytime. This makes combining different and messy data slightly trickier because for some data, anytime will return an error, and for others it'll return NAs silently.

I agree though, garbage in, what else are we expecting!

Confirming where I first noticed this class(NA) = "logical".

[eddelbuettel]

I think you found a valid bug -- so thanks for bringing it to my attention -- even if we agree that it is a marginal corner case.

You can have NA values just fine but they have to be typed so NA in char, or numeric, or date(time), or ... should work.