R devel - Jun 2022 - as.Date (and strptime?) does not recognize "  " as a blank

Hello, All:


	  When is a space not a space?


	  Consider the following:


 > (pblmDate <- textutils::HTMLdecode("&nbsp;2 Mar 2018"))
[1] " 2 Mar 2018"
 > as.Date(pblmDate, format='%e %b %Y')
[1] NA
 > as.Date(' 2 Mar 2018', format='%e %b %Y')
[1] "2018-03-02"


	  Is this a feature or a bug?


	  I can work around it, now that I know what it is, but it took me a 
few hours to diagnose.


	  Thanks,
	  Spencer Graves


p.s.  I got this from scraping a website with code that had worked for 
me roughly 20 months ago.  I suspect that in the interim, someone 
probably replaced ' 2 Mar 2018' with "&nbsp;2 Mar 2018".

p.s.  Is there a way to get XML::readHTMLTable to automatically convert 
" " to a normal blank space?


On 6/25/22 1:37 AM, Spencer Graves wrote:
> Hello, All:
> 
> 
>  ????? When is a space not a space?
> 
> 
>  ????? Consider the following:
> 
> 
>  > (pblmDate <- textutils::HTMLdecode("&nbsp;2 Mar
2018"))
> [1] " 2 Mar 2018"
>  > as.Date(pblmDate, format='%e %b %Y')
> [1] NA
>  > as.Date(' 2 Mar 2018', format='%e %b %Y')
> [1] "2018-03-02"
> 
> 
>  ????? Is this a feature or a bug?
> 
> 
>  ????? I can work around it, now that I know what it is, but it took me 
> a few hours to diagnose.
> 
> 
>  ????? Thanks,
>  ????? Spencer Graves
> 
> 
> p.s.? I got this from scraping a website with code that had worked for 
> me roughly 20 months ago.? I suspect that in the interim, someone 
> probably replaced ' 2 Mar 2018' with "&nbsp;2 Mar
2018".
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

Hello,
> When is a space not a space?
I guess the answer is when it is a non-breaking one?..

We can observe:
 > charToRaw(textutils::HTMLdecode(" "))
 [1] c2 a0
 > charToRaw(" ")
 [1] 20
So one can argue that everything works correctly - `textutils` function converts
HTML's non-breaking space ' ' into R's non-breaking
space '\xa0', while %e format of as.Date expects a 'normal'
space.
But this is obviously not user-friendly especially since both symbols are
displayed the same way on the console.
So your options might be to either:
 * manually change all 'weird' spaces into normal ones with something
like gsub("\\h", " ", ..., perl = TRUE) - for the list of
other weird spaces see
https://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/pcrepattern.html#genericchartypes
 * persuade textutils author to change   into a normal space (they seem
to be working with a simple lookup table -
https://github.com/enricoschumann/textutils/blob/b813c7bd4b55daef5fa7612e3fbfe82962711940/R/char_refs.R#L1465-L1466)
 * persuade R-Core (or submit a PR) to relax expectations of as.Date/strptime

Kind regards,
Maxim Nazarov

----- On Jun 25, 2022, at 8:37 AM, Spencer Graves spencer.graves at prodsyse.com
wrote:
> Hello, All:
> 
> 
>	  When is a space not a space?
> 
> 
>	  Consider the following:
> 
> 
> > (pblmDate <- textutils::HTMLdecode("&nbsp;2 Mar
2018"))
> [1] " 2 Mar 2018"
> > as.Date(pblmDate, format='%e %b %Y')
> [1] NA
> > as.Date(' 2 Mar 2018', format='%e %b %Y')
> [1] "2018-03-02"
> 
> 
>	  Is this a feature or a bug?
> 
> 
>	  I can work around it, now that I know what it is, but it took me a
> few hours to diagnose.
> 
> 
>	  Thanks,
>	  Spencer Graves
> 
> 
> p.s.  I got this from scraping a website with code that had worked for
> me roughly 20 months ago.  I suspect that in the interim, someone
> probably replaced ' 2 Mar 2018' with "&nbsp;2 Mar
2018".
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel