gnuplot statistics with time data (converted from string as float) fails as single argument

Question

I have a data file with time data as one column. Since the stats command is not compatible with time data(Stats command not available in timedata mode), we have to do some conversion first:

set xdata
stats 'data' u (strptime(fmt,strcol(1)))

this does not work however. gnuplot prints the following error: All points out of range

I don't know why, but I had the idea to use a second artificial column:

stats 'data' u (strptime(fmt,strcol(1))):(1.0)

This works as intended (why?), but with an unnecessary second column. For me, this "workaround" is ok, because I don't have big data files to plot, but if people had... This could be quite annoying.

Did I miss something?
Why does gnuplot stats behaves this way?
Is this a bug, worth reporting?

Answer 1

Probably you have set an yrange before calling the stats command. If you call stats with a single column, the data is treated as y-column. In your second call you give an explicit second column, and the time data is treated as x-column.

Calling

reset
fmt = "%Y..."
stats 'data' u (strptime(fmt,strcol(1)))

should work fine.