print.utDate {udunits}R Documentation

Print a Formatted Calendar Date

Description

Prints a formatted version of a 'utDate' object, which holds a calendar date.

Usage

 print.utDate( x, quiet=FALSE, format="full", ... )

Arguments

x A utDate class object, with fields year, month, day, hour, minute, second.
quiet if TRUE, then returns the formatted string without printing it
format Controls the printed format. Can be "full" (the default), "slashes", "unix", "sci", or "underscore".
... Other arguments are passed back to 'print' when the formatted date is printed.

Details

Dates in the udunits package are described by an object with class 'utDate'. A 'utDate' is a list with fields year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. Year is a 4-digit integer, month is a 2-digit integer (1=Jan, 12=Dec), day is a two digit integer (1-31), hour is a 2-digit integer (0-23), minute is a two digit integer (0-59), and second is a floating point in the range [0.,60.). The routine utCalendar() returns an object of class utDate. Typically, if a user's code wants to create a utDate, it must do so by hand, as illustrated in the example below.

This function formats a utDate object into a human-readable character string, and usually prints it (alternatively, if quiet=TRUE, it returns the string without printing it). Various formats are supported. For example, given the date June 15th, 1990, at 12:43 PM, the various formats give the following: "full" gives "1990/06/15 12:43"; "unix" gives "Fri Jun 15 12:43 1990"; "sci" gives "15 Jun 1990"; "slashes" gives "1990/06/15"; "underscore" gives "1990_Jun_15".

Value

Ordinarly, nothing. However, if quiet=TRUE, returns the formatted character string version of the date instead of printing it.

Author(s)

Library code by Unidata; interface glue implemented by David W. Pierce dpierce@ucsd.edu

See Also

utInit, utScan, utCalendar, utInvCalendar, utFormatDate, utDayOfWeek, utIsTime, utHasOrigin, utConvert

Examples

# Make a 'utDate' object by hand.  This class of object is also
# returned by function 'utCalendar()'
date <- list() 
class(date) <- "utDate"
date$year   <- 1990
date$month  <- 6
date$day    <- 15
date$hour   <- 12
date$minute <- 30 
date$second <- 10.0

print(date)     # default format is "full"

# Turn the date into a character string without printing it
s <- print(date,format="unix",quiet=TRUE)

print(paste("here is that date one more time:",s))

# Note that if you want a formatted date INSIDE a paste call, you 
# have to call print with quiet=TRUE, like this:
print(paste("Yet another way of formatting the date:",print(date,format="sci",quiet=TRUE)))

[Package udunits version 1.3 Index]