R-studio server returns error after simple if-else code execution

Question

I am currently facing this problem. Analyzing a big data-set (roughly 3 million observations), I need to convert a variable from a format to another. Specifically, I had the date of incorporation of several firms, but coming in two formats: YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY, or other possibilities of which the last 4 characters were always relative to the year.

What I need is just the year so I developed this code:

library(stringi)

for (i in 1:length(amadeus$Dateofincorporation) {
    if(nchar(amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i]) == 4 & 
       !is.na(amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i])) {
        amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i] <- amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i]
    } 
    else if (nchar(amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i]) != 4 & 
             !is.na(amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i])) {
        amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i] <- stri_sub(amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i],-4,-1)
    } 
    else { 
        amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i] <- amadeus$Dateofincorporation[i] 
    }
}

The code executes for a long time, and then returns the output:

Warning messages: 1: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : display list redraw incomplete 2: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : invalid graphics state 3: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : invalid graphics state 4: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : display list redraw incomplete 5: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : invalid graphics state 6: In doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler) : invalid graphics state

Does anyone have an idea on how to deal with this?

P.S. the vector is currently a character vector, do you think this has an impact?

Answer 1

Just increase the size of the graphics device (bottom right pane in rstudio) and the warning will vanish. Alernatively clear all the plots already in the graphics pane and you won't see the warning again.