R BGU 2016 Example 1

Date objects can be constructed by pasting individual elements (day, month, year) and then using function as.Date. For example:

day = 15
month = 4
year = 2016

# Creating a character vector (of length 1)
d_char = paste(year, month, day, sep = "-")
d_char

## [1] "2016-4-15"

class(d_char)

## [1] "character"

# Converting to Date
d_date = as.Date(d_char)
d_date

## [1] "2016-04-15"

class(d_date)

## [1] "Date"

# Difference from today
today = Sys.Date()
d_date - today

## Time difference of 5 days

We can also get get individual components of a Date object, as character vectors, using the format function. For example:

format(today, "%Y") # Year

## [1] "2016"

format(today, "%b") # Month, etc.

## [1] "Apr"