[ARROW-15804] [R] Improve as.Date() error message when supplying several tryFormats

• Type: Sub-task
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 9.0.0
• Component/s: R
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/31245
• Assignee: Dragoș Moldovan-Grünfeld
• Reporter: Dragoș Moldovan-Grünfeld
• Created: 28/Feb/22 17:33
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 11:39
• Resolved: 05/Jul/22 11:35

Description

We could use coalesce() to cycle through several formats. However this would not get us a behaviour identical to base R. For more on this see Jon's comment in the umbrella / parent issue. 

I improved the error message and the behaviour with remain the same. Users will not be able to supply more formats to tryFormats, but they will be advised to try the specialised parsing functions when they do so.

Issue Links

• depends upon: ARROW-15659 [R] strptime should return NA (not error) with format mismatch
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #13070