Dates are not so sweet It is known: parsing dates entered by humans is a huge pain: Source: https://xkcd.com/1179/ ISO 8601 nerds: a crack has developed in the old way. The new year has wounded both the m/d/yy and the d/m/yy factions. The time is ripe for a new global order. TONIGHT (2020-01-01) WE RIDE https://t.co/1YTL1SWDm2 — Brooke Watson Madubuonwu (@brookLYNevery1) January 1, 2020 Dates are a never-ending source of fresh hell.
I started writing in R before the tidyverse became a thing and I never really had to think about non-standard evaluation when writing functions. Those days are long past and I’ve recently struggled with the challenge when writing functions for the R4EPIs project, which would stick out like ugly little trolls along side tidyverse functions. One of my biggest struggles was trying to figure out how, excactly to select a varaible from a user as either a character string or a bare variable.