Take the 2-minute tour ×  PHP has this wonderful function,
strtotime, that takes any string containing just about any date
format and returns a time (secs-since-1970). It is more future-
proof than strptime, for instance, because if the date format
changes my script does not break. Does R have anything similar?
(I don't need the time-relative feature of strtotime as of
today, but I'm sure at some point I'll need strtotime("next
Thursday"), or strtotime("first day of last month"), so if you
know R extensions that do that too, then I'd love to hear about
it!)  UPDATE: If anyone (possibly me at some point in the
future) want to try implementing this in R, or any other
language, I tracked down the source code for it. The relevant
files are timelib.h, timelib.re and timelib_structs.h. It
appears to all be standard C and standalone, no PHP headers to
bring in. However the compile process compiles the *.re file
into real C, so you will need to install and compile PHP at
least once.  The code that calls it is also qu