Looping over a Date or POSIXct object results in a numeric iterator

Solution 1:

?"for" says that seq (the part after in) is "[A]n expression evaluating to a vector (including a list and an expression) or to a pairlist or 'NULL'".

So your Date vector is being coerced to numeric because Date objects aren't strictly vectors:

is.vector(Sys.Date())
# [1] FALSE
is.vector(as.numeric(Sys.Date()))
# [1] TRUE

The same is true for POSIXct vectors:

is.vector(Sys.time())
# [1] FALSE
is.vector(as.numeric(Sys.time()))
# [1] TRUE

Solution 2:

loop through days (strings):

     days <- seq(from=as.Date('2011-02-01'), to=as.Date("2011-03-02"),by='days' )
     for ( i in seq_along(days) )
     {
          print(i)
           print(days[i])
      }