Subtracting months - issue with last day of month?

Question

Quick question on dates in R. Check out this snippet of code:

Sys.Date() - months(3)
# [1] \"2013-12-31\"
Sys.Date() - months(18)
# [1] NA

Answer 1

The solution provides forward months exactly, i.e. 28Feb %m+% gives 28Mar, which is not ideal if working with month end data.

To adjust the top to always give you the last day of the month, use the following code:

ceiling_date((as.Date("2014-02-28") %m+% months(1)),"month")-days(1)

> "2014-03-31"