Table of Contents
Subsetting by a date range in R can be done using the subset() and between() functions. These functions can be used to filter a data frame by a given date range, specified within the between() function. An example of this would be subset(data, between(Date, as.Date(“2020-01-01”), as.Date(“2020-04-30”))) which would extract all of the rows in the data frame with a Date between January 1, 2020 and April 30, 2020.
The easiest way to subset a data frame by a date range in R is to use the following syntax:
df[df$date >= "some date" & df$date <= "some date", ]
This tutorial provides several examples of how to use this function in practice.
Example 1: Subset Between Two Dates
The following code shows how to select the rows of a data frame that fall between two dates, inclusive:
#make this example reproducible set.seed(0) #create data frame df <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-01-01") - 0:19, sales = runif(20, 10, 500) + seq(50, 69)^2) #view first six rows head(df) date sales 1 2021-01-01 2949.382 2 2020-12-31 2741.099 3 2020-12-30 2896.341 4 2020-12-29 3099.698 5 2020-12-28 3371.022 6 2020-12-27 3133.824 #subset between two dates, inclusive df[df$date >= "2020-12-25" & df$date <= "2020-12-28", ] date sales 5 2020-12-28 3371.022 6 2020-12-27 3133.824 7 2020-12-26 3586.211 8 2020-12-25 3721.891
You only need to modify the greater and less than signs to select the rows that fall between two dates, exclusive:
#make this example reproducible set.seed(0) #create data frame df <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-01-01") - 0:19, sales = runif(20, 10, 500) + seq(50, 69)^2) #subset between two dates, exclusive df[df$date > "2020-12-25" & df$date < "2020-12-28", ] date sales 6 2020-12-27 3133.824 7 2020-12-26 3586.211
Example 2: Subset After a Certain Date
The following code shows how to select the rows of a data frame that occur after a certain date:
#make this example reproducible set.seed(0) #create data frame df <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-01-01") - 0:19, sales = runif(20, 10, 500) + seq(50, 69)^2) #subset after a certain date df[df$date >= "2020-12-22", ] date sales 1 2021-01-01 2949.382 2 2020-12-31 2741.099 3 2020-12-30 2896.341 4 2020-12-29 3099.698 5 2020-12-28 3371.022 6 2020-12-27 3133.824 7 2020-12-26 3586.211 8 2020-12-25 3721.891 9 2020-12-24 3697.791 10 2020-12-23 3799.266 11 2020-12-22 3640.275
Example 3: Subset Before a Certain Date
The following code shows how to select the rows of a data frame that occur before a certain date:
#make this example reproducible set.seed(0) #create data frame df <- data.frame(date = as.Date("2021-01-01") - 0:19, sales = runif(20, 10, 500) + seq(50, 69)^2) #subset before a certain date df[df$date < "2020-12-22", ] date sales 12 2020-12-21 3831.928 13 2020-12-20 3940.513 14 2020-12-19 4315.641 15 2020-12-18 4294.211 16 2020-12-17 4612.222 17 2020-12-16 4609.873 18 2020-12-15 4850.633 19 2020-12-14 5120.034 20 2020-12-13 4957.217
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