[R] interpreting date-related error message

Erik Iverson eriki at ccbr.umn.edu
Fri Aug 27 21:38:54 CEST 2010


Toby,

What is it that you're trying to accomplish?

There seems to be several ideas confused in your post.

It sounds like you have input

x <- 1:365

and you want to call some function to return dates?
Which date should be returned for input 1?

January 1, 2010?

Your error is because if you give format a numeric
vector, the second argument is "trim", which needs
to be TRUE or FALSE, and you're giving it "%j",
which I can only assume to be an attempt to pass
one of the ?strptime format specifiers to the function.

But those come into play when you're trying to format
a Date to a character string, which is not what you have
at all.

So please give a reproducible example (we don't have
your 'dat' object, for instance) that we can run on
our own to get a good answer to you.




Toby Gass wrote:
> Hello, helpeRs,
> 
> I have a vector of numbers from 1-365 (days of the year) that I would 
> like to convert to a date.  There are no NA's and no missing values. 
> I did not insert leading zero's for numbers less than 100.
> 
> Using the syntax:
> 
> dat$doy.1 <- as.numeric(format(dat$doy, "%j" ))
> 
> I get the following error message:
>   
> Error in prettyNum(.Internal(format(x, trim, digits, nsmall, width, 
> 3L,  : 
>   invalid 'trim' argument
> 
> .What is the error message telling me?
> (Windows OS and R 2.11.1)
> 
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Toby
> 
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