[R-pkgs] New package: lubridate 0.1

[Garrett Grolemund]

Please find below the package announcement for the R package lubridate
available from cran.

Thank you,

Garrett Grolemund
Rice University

##lubridate

Date-time data can be frustrating to work with in R. R commands for
date-times are generally unintuitive and change depending on the type
of date-time object being used. Moreover, the methods we use with
date-times must be robust to time zones, leap days, daylight savings
times, and other time related quirks, and R lacks these capabilities
in some situations. Lubridate makes it easier to do the things R does
with date-times and possible to do the things R does not.
Specifically, lubridate provides:

* a set of intuitive date-time related functions that work the same
way for all common date-time classes (including those from chron,
timeDate, zoo, xts,its, tis, timeSeries, fts, and tseries)

* quick and easy parsing of date-times: ymd(), dmy(), mdy(), ...

* simple functions to extract and modify components of a date-time,
such as years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds: year(),
month(), day(), ...

* helper functions for handling time zones: with_tz(), force_tz()

Lubridate also expands the type of mathematical operations that can be
performed with date-time objects. It introduces three new time span
classes borrowed from http://joda.org.

* durations, which measure the exact amount of time between two points

* periods, which accurately track clock times despite leap years, leap
seconds, and day light savings time

* intervals, a protean summary of the time information between two points