There is a bug in as.Date.yearmon and as.Date.yearqtr which is triggered by certain NAs. Its now fixed in the development version of zoo on R-forge. Note that in your code it only affecting printing of the yearmon variable. The yearmon variable itself is correct.
Try this: source("http://r-forge.r-project.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/*checkout*/pkg/zoo/R/yearmon.R?rev=686&root=zoo") x <- as.yearmon("March 2010","%B %Y") z <- yearmon(c(NA, x)) z On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Marshall Feldman <ma...@uri.edu> wrote: > Hi, > > Some time series have missing values in the time index. For example > historical data on business cycles will typically date them from peak to > trough, but some information may be missing. In most cases, this does not > cause trouble, > but if the first date is missing (e.g., we know the date of the first trough > but not the earlier peak), we want the first element in a list of dates to > be NA. Using yearmon, this causes trouble. Consider this: > >> x <- as.yearmon("March 2010","%B %Y") >> y <- c(x,NA) >> z <- c(NA,x) >> y <- yearmon(y) >> z <- yearmon(z) >> y > [1] "Mar 2010" NA >> z > Error in charToDate(x) : > character string is not in a standard unambiguous format > > Can someone explain how to make an object of type yearmon with a missing > value in its first element? > > Thanks. > > Marsh Feldman > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.