How to Create a Range of Dates in R (Example)

In this post you’ll learn how to generate a date range in R programming.

The page contains these contents:

• Example: Generating a Range of Dates in R
• Video & Further Resources

Let’s get started…

Example: Generating a Range of Dates in R

Let’s assume that we want to create a date range with all days starting from the 20th of October 2020. Then we have to create a date object containing our starting date first:

start_date <- as.Date("2020/10/05")          # Create example date

Now, we can create a range of dates with the seq function as follows:

seq(start_date, by = "day", length.out = 5)  # Get Range with 5 dates
2020-10-05" "2020-10-06" "2020-10-07" "2020-10-08" "2020-10-09"

As you can see based on the previous R code, we have to specify three components within the seq command:

1. The starting date (as created previously)
2. The interval (i.e. we want to return R the date of each day)
3. The length of the range (i.e. 5 days)

That’s it. Now, you can modify the seq function according to your needs.

Video & Further Resources

Would you like to know more about the creation of date intervals, ranges, and daily time series objects? Then you may have a look at the following video which I have published on my YouTube channel. I illustrate the example of this article in the video:

Furthermore, I can recommend reading the other posts on my website:

• Convert Date to Day of Week in R
• Convert Date to Numeric Time Object in R
• R Functions List (+ Examples)
• The R Programming Language

In summary: In this R tutorial you learned how to generate a vector containing a regular sequences of dates. In case you have further comments and/or questions, let me know in the comments section.