How to tell lapply to ignore an error and process the next thing in the list?

Question

I have an example function below that reads in a date as a string and returns it as a date object. If it reads a string that it cannot convert to a date, it returns an erro

Answer 1

Assuming the testFunction() is not trivial and/or that one cannot alter it, it can be wrapped in a function of your own, with a tryCatch() block. For example:

> FaultTolerantTestFunction <- function(date_in) {
+    tryCatch({ret <- testFunction(date_in);}, error = function(e) {ret <<- NA});
+    ret
+ }
> FaultTolerantTestFunction('bozo')
[1] NA
> FaultTolerantTestFunction('2010-03-21')
[1] "2010-03-21"