custom colClasses forces character during fread?

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reproducing the fread example with colClasses=c(a='POSIXct'), then trace fread's '[09] Apply user overrides on column types' phase and its handling of the a column. Done means establishing whether the character-first conversion is intentional and resolving the reported type-conversion behavior with appropriate regression coverage if a change is needed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

fread

Related Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/jaredlander/status/1397586305022894082

I was surprised by the warning here:

data.table::fread('a\n1622058798', colClasses=c(a='POSIXct'))
            a
1: 1622058798
Warning message:
Column 'a' was requested to be 'POSIXct' but fread encountered the following error:
        character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
so the column has been left as type 'character' 

Shouldn't as.POSIXct be applied to an integer (not a character?)

It seems we force any overrides to be read first as character:

[09] Apply user overrides on column types
  After 1 type and 0 drop user overrides : C

I would have guessed a is read as integer (as it is if colClasses is not provided), and then as.POSIXct(1622058798) is run (which still wouldn't work)

I must be missing something -- is there a reason we apply the type override as character first in this case?

Dominant language
R
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