[datatable-help] A good way of using data.table with a date index

[Chris Neff]

Hi all,

I often have a date index in a data frame that I don't really care to keep
as a time series because I don't do any sort of smoothing or anything, but I
prefer to keep it as a date class (or POSIXct or whatever) so I can do
things like only get data past a certain date, or so plots will format
correctly.

I've found that any time I time to make a date class a key variable it
complains that it can't be converted to integer without losing information.
I've had to resort to saving them as factors and then using as.POSIXct
whenever i want them as dates, which is annoying and error prone.

Does anyone have a better way? POSIXct supports all standard equality
functions, and (I'm pretty sure) you can just convert into unix seconds
without losing anything, so why does it complain?

-Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/datatable-help/attachments/20110726/2b18dfd6/attachment.htm>