I have dates encoded in a weekly time format (European convention >> 01 through 52/53, e.g. "2016-48") and would like to standardize them to a POSIX date:
require(magrittr)
(x <- as.POSIXct("2016-12-01") %>% format("%Y-%V"))
# [1] "2016-48"
as.POSIXct(x, format = "%Y-%V")
# [1] "2016-01-11 CET"
I expected the last statement to return "2016-12-01" again. What am I missing here?
Thanks to Dirk, I was able to piece it together:
y <- sprintf("%s-1", x)
While I still don't get why this doesn't work
(as.POSIXct(y, format = "%Y-%V-%u"))
# [1] "2016-01-11 CET"
this does
(as.POSIXct(y, format = "%Y-%U-%u")
# [1] "2016-11-28 CET"
Oh my, I think using %V is a very bad idea in general:
as.POSIXct("2016-01-01") %>% format("%Y-%V")
# [1] "2016-53"
Should this be considered to be on a "serious bug" level that requires further action?!
Sticking to either %U or %W seems to be the right way to go
as.POSIXct("2016-01-01") %>% format("%Y-%U")
# [1] "2016-00"
Nope, not quite finished/still puzzled: the approach doesn't work for the very first week
(x <- as.POSIXct("2016-01-01") %>% format("%Y-%W"))
# [1] "2016-00"
as.POSIXct(sprintf("%s-1", x), format = "%Y-%W-%u")
# [1] NA
It does for week 01 as defined in the underlying convention when using %U or %W (so "week 2", actually)
as.POSIXct("2016-01-1", format = "%Y-%W-%u")
# [1] "2016-01-04 CET"
As I have to deal a lot with reporting by ISO weeks, I've created the ISOweek package some years ago.
The package includes the function ISOweek2date() which returns the date of a given weekdate (year, week of the year, day of week according to ISO 8601). It's the inverse function to date2ISOweek().
With ISOweek, your examples become:
library(ISOweek)
# define dates to convert
dates <- as.Date(c("2016-12-01", "2016-01-01"))
# convert to full ISO 8601 week-based date yyyy-Www-d
(week_dates <- date2ISOweek(dates))
[1] "2016-W48-4" "2015-W53-5"
# convert back to class Date
ISOweek2date(week_dates)
[1] "2016-12-01" "2016-01-01"
Note that date2ISOweek() requires a full ISO week-based date in the format yyyy-Www-d including the day of the week (1 to 7, Monday to Sunday).
So, if you only have year and ISO week number you have to create a character string with a day of the week specified.
A typical phrase in many reports is, e.g., "reporting week 31 ending 2017-08-06":h
yr <- 2017
wk <- 31
ISOweek2date(sprintf("%4i-W%02i-%1i", yr, wk, 7))
[1] "2017-08-06"
Please, see this answer for another use case and more background information on the ISOweek package.