Converting yearmon column to last date of the month in R

Question

I have a data frame (df) like the following:

Date        Arrivals

2014-07      100
2014-08      150
2014-09      200

I know that I can convert the yearmon dates to the first date of each month as follows:

df$Date <- as.POSIXct(paste0(as.character(df[,1]),"-01"), format = "%Y-%m-%d")

However, given that my data is not available until the end of the month I want to index it to the end rather than the beginning, and I cannot figure it out. Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

If the Date variable is an actual yearmon class vector, from the zoo package, the as.Date.yearmon method can do what you want via its argument frac.

Using your data, and assuming that the Date was originally a character vector

library("zoo")
df <- data.frame(Date = c("2014-07", "2014-08", "2014-09"),
                 Arrivals = c(100, 150, 200))

I convert this to a yearmon vector:

df <- transform(df, Date2 = as.yearmon(Date))

Assuming this is what you have, then you can achieve what you want using as.Date() with frac = 1:

df <- transform(df, Date3 = as.Date(Date2, frac = 1))

which gives:

> df
     Date Arrivals    Date2      Date3
1 2014-07      100 Jul 2014 2014-07-31
2 2014-08      150 Aug 2014 2014-08-31
3 2014-09      200 Sep 2014 2014-09-30

That shows the individual steps. If you only want the final Date this is a one-liner

## assuming `Date` is a `yearmon` object
df <- transform(df, Date = as.Date(Date, frac = 1))
## or if not a `yearmon`
df <- transform(df, Date = as.Date(as.yearmon(Date), frac = 1))

The argument frac in the fraction of the month to assign to the resulting dates when converting from yearmon objects to Date objects. Hence, to get the first day of the month, rather than convert to a character and paste on "-01" as your Question showed, it's better to coerce to a Date object with frac = 0.

If the Date in your df is not a yearmon class object, then you can solve your problem by converting it to one and then using the as.Date() method as described above.

Answer 2

Here is a way to do it using the zoo package.

R code:

library(zoo)
df
#      Date Arrivals
# 1 2014-07      100
# 2 2014-08      150
# 3 2014-09      200

df$Date <- as.Date(as.yearmon(df$Date), frac = 1)

# output
#         Date Arrivals
# 1 2014-07-31      100
# 2 2014-08-31      150
# 3 2014-09-30      200

Answer 3

Using lubridate, you can add a month and subtract a day to get the last day of the month:

library(lubridate)

ymd(paste0(df$Date, '-01')) + months(1) - days(1)
# [1] "2014-07-31" "2014-08-31" "2014-09-30"