I am pleased to announced lubridate 1.6.0. Lubridate is designed to make working with dates and times as pleasant as possible, and is maintained by Vitalie Spinu . You can install the latest version with:

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install.packages("lubridate")

This release includes a range of bug fixes and minor improvements. Some highlights from this release include:

  • period() and duration() constructors now accept character strings and allow a very flexible specification of timespans:
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period("3H 2M 1S")
#> [1] "3H 2M 1S"

duration("3 hours, 2 mins, 1 secs")
#> [1] "10921s (~3.03 hours)"

# Missing numerals default to 1.
# Repeated units are summed
period("hour minute minute")
#> [1] "1H 2M 0S"

Period and duration parsing allows for arbitrary abbreviations of time units as long as the specification is unambiguous. For single letter specs, strptime() rules are followed, so m stands for months and M for minutes.

These same rules allows you to compare strings and durations/periods:

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"2mins 1 sec" > period("2mins")
#> [1] TRUE
  • Date time rounding (with round_date(), floor_date() and ceiling_date()) now supports unit multipliers, like “3 days” or “2 months”:
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ceiling_date(ymd_hms("2016-09-12 17:10:00"), unit = "5 minutes")
#> [1] "2016-09-12 17:10:00 UTC"

  • The behavior of ceiling_date for Date objects is now more intuitive. In short, dates are now interpreted as time intervals that are physically part of longer unit intervals:

    |day1| … |day31|day1| … |day28| … | January | February | …

That means that rounding up 2000-01-01 by a month is done to the boundary between January and February which, i.e. 2000-02-01:

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ceiling_date(ymd("2000-01-01"), unit = "month")
#> [1] "2000-02-01"

This behavior is controlled by the change_on_boundary argument.

  • It is now possible to compare POSIXct and Date objects:
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ymd_hms("2000-01-01 00:00:01") > ymd("2000-01-01")
#> [1] TRUE

  • C-level parsing now handles English months and AM/PM indicator regardless of your locale. This means that English date-times are now always handled by lubridate C-level parsing and you don’t need to explicitly switch the locale.

  • New parsing function yq() allows you to parse a year + quarter:

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yq("2016-02")
#> [1] "2016-04-01"

The new q format is available in all lubridate parsing functions.

See the release notes for the full list of changes. A big thanks goes to everyone who contributed: @arneschillert , @cderv , @ijlyttle , @jasonelaw , @jonboiser , and @krlmlr .