R devel - Nov 2012 - Strange behaviour in as.Date

I have been having trouble passing a default argument to
base::as.Date.character and think it is due to some funkiness in the
function definition.

base::as.Date.character is defined as

function (x, format = "", ...)  {
    # stuff deleted
    res <- if (missing(format))
        charToDate(x)
    else strptime(x, format, tz = "GMT")
    as.Date(res)
}

which gives unexpected behaviour when passing a default value of ""
for
format. I think the check "if(missing(format))" should really be
"if(format=="")".

Defining the wrapper:

as.Date.character <- function(x, format='', ...) {
            if(format=='') base::as.Date.character(x, ...)
            else base::as.Date.character(x, format=format, ...)
}

provides (what I think is) the expected behaviour.

... is this the right list for this post?

Cheers,
Simon Knapp

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