Fatal error when parsing date with %

[peterdesmet]

R strptime() documents that % in date/time/datetime can be escaped as %%:

Any character in the format string not part of a conversion specification is interpreted literally (and %% gives %).

This works indeed:

strptime("2011-01-03%", format = "%Y-%m-%d%%")

The Python implementation suggests the same (last element of table at https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior).

But trying this in readr::parse_date() gives a fatal error:

library(readr)
parse_date("2011-01-03%", format = "%Y-%m-%d%%")

Granted, readr doesn't claim to support this escape, but given that it seems to be a standard elsewhere, it would probably be good to handle it. 😄

[jimhester]

This is a duplicate of #1151 and #1182, it is already fixed in the development version of readr.