[Rd] bug in cut.Date() (PR#9433)

[martin.becker at mx.uni-saarland.de]

Full_Name: Martin Becker
Version: 2.4.1
OS: WinXP/Linux
Submission from: (NULL) (134.96.96.42)


When using cut.Date() with 'breaks="year"', the month of the breakpoints is
properly set to January, but the day of month is not set to 1.

This leads to a strange behaviour, see the following example:

 > cut(as.Date(c("2000-01-17","2001-01-13","2001-01-20")),breaks="y")
[1] 2000-01-17 2000-01-17 2001-01-17
Levels: 2000-01-17 2001-01-17

I asked on R-devel (2006-12-20), if there are reasons for this (in my opinion
strange) behaviour, but since I got no answer, I suppose this behaviour is not
intended and thus there is a bug in cut.Date(). 

The corresponding code fragment which defines the first breakpoint in 
the case 'breaks="year"' reads (2.4.1, 2.4.1 patched, 2.5.0):

        if (valid == 4) {
            start$mon <- 0
            incr <- 366
        }
 
I think, the code fragment above should better read:

        if (valid == 4) {
            start$mon <- 0
            start$mday <- 1
            incr <- 366
        }

The following patch to src/library/base/R/dates.R should do this change:

301c301
<       if(valid == 4) { start$mon <- 0; incr <- 366 }
---
>       if(valid == 4) { start$mon <- 0; start$mday <- 1; incr <- 366 }

Kind regards,

  Martin