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I have a date in R, e.g.:

dt = as.Date('2010/03/17')

I would like to subtract 2 years from this date, without worrying about leap years and such issues, getting as.Date('2008-03-17').

How would I do that?

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8 Answers 8

Reset to default
106

With lubridate 

library(lubridate)
ymd("2010/03/17") - years(2)
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2
  • 5
    This doesn't work as expected for leap years: ymd("2016/02/29") - years(2) returns NA. Using %m-% months(24) returns "2014-02-28". And to be extra sure, %m-% months(48) returns "2012-02-29".
    – user2105469
    Commented Feb 9, 2018 at 0:12
  • 4
    This is the expected behavior from lubridate. The documentation for lubricate explicitly states this: Consider a simple operation, January 31st + one month. Should the answer be: * February 31st (which doesn’t exist) * March 4th (31 days after January 31), or * February 28th (assuming its not a leap year) A basic property of arithmetic is that a + b - b = a. Only solution 1 obeys this property, but it is an invalid date... if adding or subtracting a month or a year creates an invalid date, lubridate will return an NA.
    – Patrick Conwell
    Commented May 1, 2018 at 15:38
58

The easiest thing to do is to convert it into POSIXlt and subtract 2 from the years slot.

> d <- as.POSIXlt(as.Date('2010/03/17'))
> d$year <- d$year-2
> as.Date(d)
[1] "2008-03-17"

See this related question: How to subtract days in R?.

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3
  • 1
    rcs's answer below is preferable -- we do have difftime operator for it.
    – Dirk is no longer here
    Commented Jul 24, 2010 at 14:29
  • 3
    With difftime, I don't think you can do years, just days or weeks.
    – gt6989b
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 12:43
  • 3
    Be careful in case of Feb-29, because the resulting object will probably have wday/mon/mday slots not correct ! Try : d=as.POSIXlt('2016-02-29',tz='GMT');d$year=d$year - 1 and check the values of d$wday,d$mon,d$mday
    – digEmAll
    Commented Feb 19, 2018 at 18:20
31

You could use seq:

R> dt = as.Date('2010/03/17')
R> seq(dt, length=2, by="-2 years")[2]
[1] "2008-03-17"
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4
  • 4
    there is no way to apply this to a list of dates, though, unless I'm missing a simple extension
    – MichaelChirico
    Commented Feb 2, 2015 at 0:23
  • seq.Date is also possible. seq.Date(as.Date('2010/03/17'),length.out=2,by='-1 year')[2]
    – Jerry T
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 17:04
  • @JerryT seq.Date is the dispatched S3 method when using seq
    – rcs
    Commented Dec 23, 2019 at 10:56
  • If you don't mind, I find the choice of "2" confusing it terms of seeing this solution. For others "struggling" like me, i think the following is a lot clearer: x <- 2 seq(Sys.Date(), length=2, by=paste0("-", x, " years"))[2]. You can change x for other intervals (3, 4, etc), that's the variable - the other "2"s are "fixed... I believe it would then be easy to apply this list, as requested by @MichaelChirico
    – tchevrier
    Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 8:00
12

If leap days are to be taken into account then I'd recommend using this lubridate function to subtract months, as other methods will return either March 1st or NA:

> library(lubridate)
> dt %m-% months(12*2)
[1] "2008-03-17"

# Try with leap day
> leapdt <- as.Date('2016/02/29')
> leapdt %m-% months(12*2)
[1] "2014-02-28"
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1
  • 1
    Whether you get Feb. 28th or March 1st is a matter of convention. NA is obviously unacceptable, I agree. Thanks for adding info.
    – gt6989b
    Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 16:33
3

Same answer than the one by rcs but with the possibility to operate it on a vector (to answer to MichaelChirico, I can't comment I don't have enough rep): 

R> unlist(lapply(c("2015-12-01", "2016-12-01"), 
      function(x) { return(as.character(seq(as.Date(x), length=2, by="-1 years")[2])) }))
 [1] "2014-12-01" "2015-12-01"
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0
2

This way seems to do the job as well

dt = as.Date("2010/03/17")
dt-365*2
[1] "2008-03-17"

as.Date("2008/02/29")-365*2
## [1] "2006-03-01"
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1
  • 1
    I'm concerned this will not provide the right date due to leap years
    – tommmm
    Commented Mar 9, 2022 at 10:07
1 
cur_date <- str_split(as.character(Sys.Date()), pattern = "-")
cur_yr <- cur_date[[1]][1]
cur_month <- cur_date[[1]][2]
cur_day <- cur_date[[1]][3]
new_year <- as.integer(year) - 2
new_date <- paste(new_year, cur_month, cur_day, sep="-")
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1

Using Base R, you can simply use the following without installing any package.

1) Transform your character string to Date format, specifying the input format in the second argument, so R can correctly interpret your date format.

dt = as.Date('2010/03/17',"%Y/%m/%d")

NOTE: If you look now at your enviroment tab you will see dt as variable with the following value "2010-03-17" (Year-month-date separated by "-" not by "/")

2) specify how many years to substract

years_substract=2

3) Use paste() combined with format () to only keep Month and Day and Just substract 2 year from your original date. Format() function will just keep the specific part of your date accordingly with format second argument.

dt_substract_2years<-
as.Date(paste(as.numeric(format(dt,"%Y"))-years_substract,format(dt,"%m"),format(dt,"%d"),sep = "-"))

NOTE1: We used paste() function to concatenate date components and specify separator as "-" (sep = "-")as is the R separator for dates by default.

NOTE2: We also used as.numeric() function to transform year from character to numeric

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1
  • Thanks for answering. How is this essentially different than @tommmm's answer? (agree has more comments to explain what's going on, +1)
    – gt6989b
    Commented Aug 18, 2022 at 17:01

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