Dates of special one-off holidays in the UK

Gives dates of special one-off holidays in the UK.

Usage

specialHolidayGB(year = getRmetricsOptions("currentYear"),
                     value = "timeDate", named = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

year

the year(s) for which special holidays are required, a vector containing four-digit integer number(s) of the form CCYY, e.g. 2023.

value

the class of the returned value. If "timeDate", the default, return a "timeDate" object, if "" return a character vector.

named

if TRUE, the dates are named, otherwise unnamed.

...

further arguments for as.character when value = "".

Details

specialHolidayGB gives the special Bank holidays in England for the years specified by argument year, such as the Millenium day at the end of 1999 and significant Royal events. Don't assume that there is at most one special holiday in a given year, 2022 had two.

Years that do not contain special Bank holidays are omitted. If there are no special holidays in the specified year(s) the results is a "timeDate" or "character" object of length zero.

The holidays are sorted in increasing time order.

Argument value controls the class of the result. The default is "timeDate". The result is a character vector if value = "" (the empty string). In the latter case, further arguments for the transformation to character can be passed in argument "..." (e.g., format).

If argument named is TRUE, the dates get names asssociated with them, so one can see which date represents which holiday.

Value

a "timeDate" or a character vector, as requested by argument

value.

Author

Georgi N. Boshnakov

Note

While most of the holidays given by the functions with prefix GBxxx are valid for the UK as a whole and they are (or should be) fully correct for England, there are variations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Functions containing 'London' in their name refer to the London Stock Exchange. Currently, the Bank holidays given by those functions are the same as for England. Actually, the 'official' holidays between 1834 and 1870 were set by the Bank of England. The first Act of Parlament on the issue is from 1871.

See also

GBSummerBankHoliday for functions giving specific regular Bank holidays,

holidayLONDON for all London Stock Exchange holidays (actually, England holidays) in requested years.

Examples

## UK Millenium day
specialHolidayGB(1999)     # as a dateTime object
#> GMT
#> [1] [1999-12-31]
specialHolidayGB(1999, "") # as a character string
#> [1] "1999-12-31"

## 2 special holidays in UK in 2022
specialHolidayGB(2022)     # [2022-06-03] [2022-09-19]
#> GMT
#> [1] [2022-06-03] [2022-09-19]
## what are their names?
specialHolidayGB(2022, named = TRUE)
#> GMT
#> GBQueensPlatinumJubileeDay         GBQueensFuneralDay 
#>               [2022-06-03]               [2022-09-19] 

## the Spring BH is usually on last Monday of May, but not in 2022
dayOfWeek(GBSpringBankHoliday(2020:2024))
#> 2020-05-25 2021-05-31 2022-06-02 2023-05-29 2024-05-27 
#>      "Mon"      "Mon"      "Thu"      "Mon"      "Mon" 

## the above formed a nice 4-day weekend in early June 2022
## (look at the Thu-Fri sequence on 2-3 June)
dayOfWeek(holidayLONDON(2022))
#> 2022-01-03 2022-04-15 2022-04-18 2022-05-02 2022-06-02 2022-06-03 2022-08-29 
#>      "Mon"      "Fri"      "Mon"      "Mon"      "Thu"      "Fri"      "Mon" 
#> 2022-09-19 2022-12-26 2022-12-27 
#>      "Mon"      "Mon"      "Tue"