Consider allowing Dates in place of epiranges, Dates & hyphenated datestrings in epiranges

[brookslogan]

Currently, Date objects cannot be fed in as, e.g., time_values to epidatr::covidcast, as Date objects are not considered epirange-like, nor can they be used successfully as the endpoints of an epirange. This is an inconvenience, as often we do Date-based arithmetic or use Sys.Date() to arrive at time_values of interest, and, furthermore, simply using as.character or toString doesn't always put them in the accepted format. (The hyphenated-string handling might require a little care due to hyphens being allowed to represent ranges between non-hyphenated-datestrings; hyphenated strings probably will need converted to non-hyphenated strings somewhere, and probably already are in the situations where they already work.)

It'd be nice for all, not just some, of the queries below to work. [Providing more comprehensible and helpful error messages, if easier, could be a temporary patch (--- e.g., suggesting to use format(dates, "%Y%m%d")).]

library(epidatr)
library(magrittr)
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          "20220101", "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 1 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          c("20220101","20220102"), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 2 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> 2 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-02      NA 2022-07-10   189
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          "20220101-20220105", "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 5 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> 2 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-02      NA 2022-07-10   189
#> 3 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-03      NA 2022-03-23    79
#> 4 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-04      NA 2022-08-04   212
#> 5 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-05      NA 2022-03-23    77
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          epirange("20220101","20220105"), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 5 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> 2 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-02      NA 2022-07-10   189
#> 3 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-03      NA 2022-03-23    79
#> 4 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-04      NA 2022-08-04   212
#> 5 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-05      NA 2022-03-23    77
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          "2022-01-01", "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 1 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          c("2022-01-01", "2022-01-02"), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> # A tibble: 2 × 15
#>   geo_value signal    source geo_t…¹ time_…² time_value direc…³ issue        lag
#>   <chr>     <chr>     <chr>  <ord>   <ord>   <date>       <dbl> <date>     <int>
#> 1 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-01      NA 2022-03-23    81
#> 2 us        confirme… hhs    nation  day     2022-01-02      NA 2022-07-10   189
#> # … with 6 more variables: missing_value <int>, missing_stderr <int>,
#> #   missing_sample_size <int>, value <dbl>, stderr <dbl>, sample_size <dbl>,
#> #   and abbreviated variable names ¹​geo_type, ²​time_type, ³​direction
#> # ℹ Use `colnames()` to see all variable names
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          epirange("2022-01-01", "2022-01-05"), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> Error: '' does not exist in current working directory ('/tmp/RtmpFtrhOX/reprex-20de19cb4198-prior-boa').
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          epirange("2022-01-01", "2022-01-05"), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> Error: '' does not exist in current working directory ('/tmp/RtmpFtrhOX/reprex-20de19cb4198-prior-boa').
date = as.Date("2022-01-05")
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          date, "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> Error in !is.list: invalid argument type
# (the weird error message here is from #46) 
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          c(date, date+1L), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> Error in !is.list: invalid argument type
# (the weird error message here is from #46) 
n_days = 5L
covidcast("hhs", "confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop", "day", "nation",
          epirange(date, date + n_days - 1L), "*") %>% fetch_tbl()
#> Error in epirange(date, date + n_days - 1L): (is.numeric(from) || is.character(from)) && length(from) == 1 is not TRUE

^{Created on 2022-09-27 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

[dshemetov]

fixed by #89