Calculate ages in R

Question

I have two data frames in R. One frame has a persons year of birth:

YEAR
/1931
/1924

and then another column shows a more recent time.

Answer 1

I use a custom function, see code below, convenient to use in mutate and quite flexible (you'll need the lubridate package).

Examples

get_age("2000-01-01")
# [1] 17
get_age(lubridate::as_date("2000-01-01"))
# [1] 17
get_age("2000-01-01","2015-06-15")
# [1] 15
get_age("2000-01-01",dec = TRUE)
# [1] 17.92175
get_age(c("2000-01-01","2003-04-12"))
# [1] 17 14
get_age(c("2000-01-01","2003-04-12"),dec = TRUE)
# [1] 17.92176 14.64231

Function

#' Get age
#' 
#' Returns age, decimal or not, from single value or vector of strings
#' or dates, compared to a reference date defaulting to now. Note that
#' default is NOT the rounded value of decimal age.
#' @param from_date vector or single value of dates or characters
#' @param to_date date when age is to be computed
#' @param dec return decimal age or not
#' @examples
#' get_age("2000-01-01")
#' get_age(lubridate::as_date("2000-01-01"))
#' get_age("2000-01-01","2015-06-15")
#' get_age("2000-01-01",dec = TRUE)
#' get_age(c("2000-01-01","2003-04-12"))
#' get_age(c("2000-01-01","2003-04-12"),dec = TRUE)
get_age <- function(from_date,to_date = lubridate::now(),dec = FALSE){
  if(is.character(from_date)) from_date <- lubridate::as_date(from_date)
  if(is.character(to_date))   to_date   <- lubridate::as_date(to_date)
  if (dec) { age <- lubridate::interval(start = from_date, end = to_date)/(lubridate::days(365)+lubridate::hours(6))
  } else   { age <- lubridate::year(lubridate::as.period(lubridate::interval(start = from_date, end = to_date)))}
  age
}