[R] POSIX, timezones and R-ODBC

[Cedrick Johnson]

Howdy-

I recently upgraded to R 2.9.1 and did the updates for all of my packages. A
few of them now *suggest* the TZ variable to be set, which I did:

> Sys.getenv("TZ")
TZ 
"" 
> Sys.setenv(TZ="America/New_York")
> Sys.getenv("TZ")
                TZ 
"America/New_York"

Next up:

library(RODBC)
library(quantmod)
channel <- odbcConnect("mylovelydb")
> GS = sqlQuery(channel, paste("select Date, o, h, l, c, v from GS ORDER BY
Date ASC"))
Error in as.POSIXlt.character(x, tz, ...) : 
  character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In structure(.Internal(as.POSIXct(x, tz)), class = c("POSIXt",
"POSIXct"),  :
  unknown timezone 'merica/New_York'


Strange thing: I set up the same thing with R2.9.0 (and as expected, I got
warnings when loading libraries that were built on 2.9.1, but that's ok) --
everything above works with 2.9.0 fine and dandy.

I am wondering how could the TZ, which is "America/New_York" become a
malformed character ('A'). It seems to be either a RODBC issue or something
more sinister under the hood with retrieving the TZ environment variable?

Note, this all works in 2.9.1 if the TZ variable is set to GMT. I can live
with that for the time being as a workaround. To further aid in debugging,
I've attached my sessionInfo output:

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.9.1 (2009-06-26) 
i386-pc-mingw32 

locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  tcltk     utils     methods
base     

other attached packages:
 [1] quantmod_0.3-10 TTR_0.2         Defaults_1.1-1  xts_0.6-6
zoo_1.5-6      
 [6] RODBC_1.2-6     svSocket_0.9-43 svMisc_0.9-48   TinnR_1.0.3
R2HTML_1.59-1  
[11] Hmisc_3.6-0     rcom_2.1-3      rscproxy_1.3-1 

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] cluster_1.12.0  grid_2.9.0      lattice_0.17-25 tools_2.9.0

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
CJ

--
Cedrick W. Johnson
aim) cedrickjcvgr
www.cedrickjohnson.com