From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Wed Oct 31 11:38:07 2001
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:38:07 +0100 (MET)
Subject: [Rd] strptime bug (PR#1155)
Message-ID: <200110311138.MAA13738@pubhealth.ku.dk>

On 31 Oct 2001, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk writes:
>
> > > ## The beav1 example in  *help[R](plot.POSIXct)* shows two bugs.
> > > ## The first is a fundamental error in strptime.
> >
> > In your OS's implementation of strptime, not the R code ....
> ...
> > It would be helpful to give the incorrect output that your system gives.
> > In the output below I see no evidence of `the times wrap'.  Using the
> > wrong day seems to be a bug in glibc's strptime, but you need to unclass
> > the strptime result to see this.  (I do see the strptime bug on RH6.2
> > Linux, where the day field is ignored.)
>
> RH7.1 too.


I've located the problem, which boils down to inaccuracies in the
following in man strptime:

       The  GNU  libc  implementation does not touch those fields
       which are not directly initialized.   Exceptions  are  the
       tm_wday  and  tm_yday elements which are recomputed if any
       of the year, month, or date elements changed.

As RMH's example shows, it does touch the tm_mon and tm_mday fields if the
year is specified (even if unchanged) but not quite always.

I am writing a workaround for R-devel.  Yet another system-specific
problem with the date-time code!

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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[Rd] strptime bug (PR#1155)
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk