Can you make dplyr::mutate and dplyr::lag default = its own input value?

Question

This is similar to this dplyr lag post, and this dplyr mutate lag post, but neither of those ask this question about defaulting to the input value. I am using dplyr to muta

Answer 1

I think Frank's solution works pretty well. Here is the complete example:

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = F)

test <- data.frame(ip=c("192.168.1.2","192.168.1.2","192.168.1.4","192.168.1.4","192.168.1.4","192.168.1.7"),
                   hour=c(2017070700,2017070700,2017070700,2017070701,2017070702,2017070700),
                   snap=c(0,15,0,45,30,15))


test %>%
  mutate(snap = formatC(snap, width = 2, flag = 0)) %>%
  mutate(fulldateint = paste(hour, snap, sep = "")) %>%
  mutate(fulldate = as.POSIXct(strptime(fulldateint, "%Y%m%d%H%M"))) %>%
  group_by(ip) %>%
  mutate(shifted = lag(fulldate, default = first(fulldate))) %>%
  mutate(diff = fulldate - shifted) %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  select(ip, fulldate, shifted, diff)

#> # A tibble: 6 x 4
#>            ip            fulldate             shifted      diff
#>                                        
#> 1 192.168.1.2 2017-07-07 00:00:00 2017-07-07 00:00:00    0 secs
#> 2 192.168.1.2 2017-07-07 00:15:00 2017-07-07 00:00:00  900 secs
#> 3 192.168.1.4 2017-07-07 00:00:00 2017-07-07 00:00:00    0 secs
#> 4 192.168.1.4 2017-07-07 01:45:00 2017-07-07 00:00:00 6300 secs
#> 5 192.168.1.4 2017-07-07 02:30:00 2017-07-07 01:45:00 2700 secs
#> 6 192.168.1.7 2017-07-07 00:15:00 2017-07-07 00:15:00    0 secs