How to find difference between two dates in R?

This recipe helps you find difference between two dates in R.

Recipe Objective: How to find difference between two dates in R?

A dataset's date variable/column is of utmost importance in carrying out a Time series and exploratory data analysis. ​A Date-format variable is read as a character type from any dataset in R. If you want to perform any sort of analysis w.r.t dates, then you must convert this character type variable to date.

This recipe will show you how to find in R difference between two dates. ​

Steps To Find Difference Between Dates in R

The following steps will show you how to subtract dates in R using the difftime() function. 

Step 1: Create 2 date variables

We will create two date variables in Date format (YYYY-MM-DD) using the as.Date() function.

date_1 = as.Date("2020-05-01") date_2 = as.Date("2020-06-01")

Step 2: Difference between two dates

We will use difftime() function to carry out this task.

Syntax: difftime(date1, date2, units = ) ​

  1. date1: Date 1 input

  2. date2: Date 2 input

  3. units: difference in "days", "weeks"

diff_dates = difftime(date_2,date_1, units = "days") diff_dates

Time difference of 31 days

Note: We mostly convert the difference in terms of a numeric value by using as.numeric() function

diff_dates = as.numeric(diff_dates) diff_dates

31

FAQs

How do I calculate the difference between two dates in different time zones in R?

You can calculate the date diff in R for different time zones by following these steps-

   - Convert both dates to POSIXct objects with their respective time zones using as.POSIXct.

   - Use the difftime function to calculate the time difference between the two POSIXct objects.

How do I calculate the difference between two dates not in the same format in R?

You can calculate the R date diff for different formats by following these steps-

      - Convert both date strings to a common date format using functions like as.Date or strptime. 

      - Calculate the difference between the converted date objects.



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