[R] Function as.Date leading to error implying that strptime requires 3 arguments

[Rob Balshaw]

Thank you to Prof Ripley, Gabor Grothendieck, Dirk Eddelbuettel and
others who emailed with suggestions and comments.

Dr Ripley's suggestion that I reinstall appears to have fixed the
problem, though I confess I have upgraded only to 2.3.0 rather than the
beta 2.3.1.  I use Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 2.0 -- my apologies for
not mentioning this.

While this instance was not serious, in itself, is it a symptom of
something more troubling?  I worry that some feature of my usage has led
to this problem.  However, if it were something I did regularly, then it
should recur.  At that time, I will certainly have to try to correct
whatever it happens to be.  

In the meantime, however, if anyone has any suggestions about what I
might have done to create this problem I'd be pleased to hear them.  I
do (or rather, did) have multiple versions of R installed, and I do make
extensive use of several libraries, including the Bioconductor set.  My
suspicion is that this would not occur if I were to remove old versions
when I upgrade.

Cheers,

Rob


-----Original Message-----
From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] 
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 11:39 PM
To: Rob Balshaw
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] Function as.Date leading to error implying that
strptime requires 3 arguments

Your system (unstated) is corrupted.  R runs its examples as part of it
test suite, so this is not an error in R 2.2.1 (which is not current:
see the posting guide which asked you to update *before* posting).  One
possibility is that you have strptime from a much earlier version of R
in use somehow.

I suggest you remove all versions of R from your system and reinstall
one latest version (2.3.1 beta).

On Fri, 19 May 2006, Rob Balshaw wrote:

>
> I'm using R V 2.2.1.  When I try an example from the as.Date help 
> page, I get an error.
>
>> x <- c("1jan1960", "2jan1960", "31mar1960", "30jul1960") z <- 
>> as.Date(x, "%d%b%Y")
> Error in strptime(x, format) : 2 arguments passed to 'strptime' which 
> requires 3
>>
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rob
>
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide! 
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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
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