NEWS

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datefixR 2.0.1 (2026-04-27)

Major changes

• Fix bugs introduced by the Rust implementation
  • Fix support for º and ª ordinal indicators
  • Prevent malformed dates being silently cast to NA
  • Fix informative error messages not being raised for fix_date_df()
• Raise an error if a date has more than three components
• Improve support for r-wasm (webR)

Code changes

• Update Rust dependencies (resolves NOTE on CRAN due to a non-API call originating from extendr-api):
  • extendr-api 0.8.1 ~> 0.9.0
  • regex 1.11 ~> 1.12.3
  • chrono 0.4 ~> 0.4.44

datefixR 2.0.0 (2025-08-22)

Major changes

• Performance enhancement: Date parsing is now over 300x faster than previous versions through Rust implementations, fastpath optimizations for common date formats, and parallel processing of columns in data frames.
• Vignettes: New vignettes added to demonstrate localization support and the built-in Shiny app.

Code changes

• Core date parsing logic completely rewritten in Rust for optimal efficiency and memory safety.
• Fastpath optimization implemented for common date formats, further improving performance.
• parallelism support in fix_date_df() via the cores argument and 'Ncpus' global option. This allows columns in data frames to be processed in parallel, allowing for faster processing of large datasets.
• Improved error handling and memory management through Rust's type system.
• First deprecated in version 1.0.0 (July 18, 2022), fix_date() and fix_dates() have now been removed. Users should use fix_date_char() and fix_date_df() instead..

Documentation

• Updated documentation to reflect Rust implementation and performance improvements.
• Performance benchmarks updated to reflect 300x+ speed improvements.
• Vignettes added describing localization support and the built-in Shiny app.

datefixR 1.7.0 (2024-09-08)

• Indonesian translations and months have been added thanks to Chitra M Saraswati (@chitrams on GitHub).

datefixR 1.6.1 (2023-12-11)

Code changes

• Added 'ene' and 'ener' as alternative names for January (thanks to @Guallasamin)

datefixR 1.6.0 (2023-09-03)

Code changes

• If day.impute is greater than the number of days for a given month, then the last day of that month will be imputed. This will also take into account there are 29 days in February in leap years. Setting day.impute = 31 ensures the last day of the month will always be imputed if the day is missing.
• An error is raised if the provided day of the year is greater than 31.
• Czech and Slovak translations have been added thanks to @MichalLauer.

Documentation

Package help file is now auto-generated.

datefixR 1.5.0 (2023-07-03)

Code changes

• exampledates has been updated to now include dates in non-English formats
• Russian translations and dates have been added thanks to @atsyplenkov.
• Fixed a bug which would cause R to freeze on Windows machines when datefixR had been built using Rtools 43.
• Experimental support has been added for months given as Roman numerals.
• A message raised if the system locale does not support multibyte characters has been translated (thanks @KittJonathan, @dpprdan, and @ajpelu) (100% translation of all user-facing messages).

Documentation

• README now lists localized date support.
• README badges have been added for translation status
• The vignette now discusses parsing dates with Roman numerals.

datefixR 1.4.1 (2023-02-10)

Code changes

• The warning raised if datefixR is used with a locale which does not accept multibyte characters now only occurs when the package is loaded using library().
• Fixed a bug where dates with single digit day and double digit year would fail
• Fixed a bug where numeric dates converted from Excel were slightly off (this is because Excel incorrectly regards 1900 as a leap year).

datefixR 1.4.0 (2023-01-17)

Code changes

Support has been added for parsing dates converted to a numeric format by Excel. Unlike R which converts Date objects to numeric by calculating the number of days since 1970-01-01, Excel typically converts date cells to numeric cells by calculating the number of days since 1900-01-01. datefixR can be told to expect dates converted by Excel instead of R by passing excel = TRUE to datefixR's functions.

In datefixR 1.3.1, internal functions began to be converted to C++. This process unintentionally led to translations of some user-facing messages not being delivered to users. This bug has now been fixed.

Documentation

Added function documentation for the new excel argument and updated the "Getting Started" vignette with a section on converting numeric dates.

datefixR 1.3.1 (2022-10-24)

Code changes

A warning is now raised if datefixR is used with a locale which does not support multibyte characters. Tests for months names in different languages now first check if multibyte characters are supported before running.

datefixR 1.3.0 (2022-10-17)

Code changes

Tests have been refactored: making it easier for others to contribute their own tests. See #57.

Documentation

• Now discuss more R packages similar to datefixR in README
• Warnings and errors have been translated to German thanks to Daniel Possenriede (@dpprdan on GitHub)
• Fixes typo in README for the German language (now "Deutsch")

datefixR 1.2.0 (2022-09-22)

Code changes

• Added much wider support for date formats commonly seen in regions where English is not the first language (de and del, "1er" "le" etc.) .

• Months with Portuguese names are now recognized.

• "." and ".'" separators are now supported.

• Support has been added for dates with ordinals ("1st", "2nd", etc.)

• datefixR will now recognize when a month-first date is given (without needing the format argument to be explicitly provided) if the month is given by name e.g "July 4th, 1776"

• Thanks to community submissions, error messages and warnings have now been translated to French and Spanish. These messages should automatically be delivered instead of the English language versions based on the locale detected by R.

  • French errors/warnings were translated by Jonathan Kitt (@KittJonathan on GitHub)
  • Spanish errors/warnings were translated by Antonio J Perez-Luque (@ajpelu on GitHub)

Documentation

The README file now mentions which languages datefixR currently supports.

datefixR 1.1.0 (2022-08-12)

This update introduces a Shiny app and support for names of months in Spanish, German, and French.

Code changes

• New function, fix_date_app() which produces a shiny app for accessing the features of datefixR. Please note, the package dependencies for this app (DT, htmltools, readxl, and shiny) are not installed alongside datefixR. This allows datefixR to be installed on secure systems where these packages may not be allowed. If one of these dependencies is not installed on the system when this function is called, then the user will have the option of installing them.
• Behind the scenes, names for months of the year are now handled differently to allow multilingual support. Spanish, German, and French is currently supported with the option to support additional languages in the future.

Documentation

• The README now uses an animation from asciicast to demonstrate the package.

datefixR 1.0.0 (2022-07-18)

For this revision, datefixR has undergone ropensci peer review which has resulted in substantial changes and improvements to the package. My sincerest thanks to the reviewers, Kaique dos S. Alves and Al-Ahmadgaid B. Asaad, and the editor, Adam H. Sparks.

Code changes

• fix_date() and fix_dates() have been deprecated in favor of fix_date_char() and fix_date_df() respectively to make the role of each function clearer. The deprecated functions will continue to work but are not guaranteed to have new features. Users will be gently encouraged to transition to the new functions.
• fix_date_char() now supports vectors as well as character objects of length 1. This also means fix_date_char() can be used with dplyr::mutate().
• An example data frame for using with the package functions, exampledates, is now provided with the package.

Documentation

• The package description has been changed to make the purpose of the package clearer.
• Instead of "cleans up", fix_date_df() is now described as "tidying" a data frame.
• Lack of support for the datetime format has been added to the README file
• The package repository is now owned by the ropensci GitHub organization and all links have been changed accordingly.

Testing

• Tests now expect specific warnings rather than warnings with any message.

datefixR 0.1.6 (2022-05-03)

• Dates with a "sept" / "Sept" abbreviation will now be correctly handled.
• Lint all R files using styler

datefixR 0.1.4 (2022-02-20)

• Update documentation to reflect support for MM/DD/YYYY formats and NA imputation

datefixR 0.1.3 (2022-01-03)

• Added support for MM/DD/YYYY formats via an optional argument, format.

datefixR 0.1.2 (2021-11-30)

• Added id argument to fix_dates(). If not explicitly stated, the first column is assumed to contain row IDs.
• Added more useful error messages which provide both the date causing the error, and the associated ID.
• Setting day.impute = NA or month.impute = NA will now result in NA if day or month is missing respectively in a date and a warning is issued. If day.impute = NULL or month.impute = NULL then the function will error if day or month is missing respectively in a date
• Added datefixR vignette which describes the package in more detail than the README
• Added fix_date() for fixing individual dates.
• Added citation file

datefixR 0.1.1 (2021-11-05)

• First version of the package
• Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.