A new package! A couple of weeks ago folks at Google released CCTZ: a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. It requires only a proper C++11 compiler and the standard IANA time zone data base which standard Unix, Linux, OS X, ... computers tend to have in /usr/share/zoneinfo.
And as the world needs nothing more than additional date, time, or timezones libraries, I started to quickly create a basic R wrapper package. This stalled as the original version of CCTZ used an __int128 for extended precision. That is not only not portable, but also prohibits compilation on baby computers still running a 32 OS (such as my trusted X1 laptop merrily plugging along with 4 gb of ram under Linux). Hence I filed an issue ticket which, lo and behold, got resolved two days ago.
And so now we have a shiny new RcppCCTZ package on CRAN in a very basic version 0.0.1. It happily runs all the original examples from CCTZ as e.g. this one:
// from examples/hello.cc
//
// [[Rcpp::export]]
int helloMoon() {
cctz::TimeZone syd;
if (!cctz::LoadTimeZone("Australia/Sydney", &syd)) return -1;
// Neil Armstrong first walks on the moon
const auto tp1 = cctz::MakeTime(1969, 7, 21, 12, 56, 0, syd);
const std::string s = cctz::Format("%F %T %z", tp1, syd);
Rcpp::Rcout << s << "\n";
cctz::TimeZone nyc;
cctz::LoadTimeZone("America/New_York", &nyc);
const auto tp2 = cctz::MakeTime(1969, 7, 20, 22, 56, 0, nyc);
return tp2 == tp1 ? 0 : 1;
}which results in
R> library(RcppCCTZ)
R> helloMoon()
1969-07-21 12:56:00 +1000
[1] 0
R>indicating that the two civil times in fact correspond to the same absolute times when Armstrong walked on the moon.
If you want to learn more about CCTZ, there was a corresponding talk CppCon (Youtube, Slides).
I hope this provides a starting point for some new interesting computation on time from R. Collaboration welcome via the RcppCCTZ GitHub repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.