Subset Data Frame Between Two Dates in R (Example)

In this R post you’ll learn how to select data frame rows in a particular date range.

The article will contain the following information:

2) Example: Extract Date Range of Data Frame Using as.Date() Function & Logical Operators

Let’s do this:

Creating Example Data

The following data is used as basement for this R programming tutorial:

data <- data.frame(date = c("2022-01-05",      # Create example data
                            "2020-03-13",
                            "2025-07-15",
                            "2019-11-22",
                            "2022-04-15",
                            "2021-12-08"),
                   values = 1:6)
data                                           # Print example data

table 1 data frame subset data frame between two dates r

Have a look at the table that has been returned after running the previous R programming code.

It illustrates that our example data has six rows and two variables. The first variable contains dates and the second variable some values.

Example: Extract Date Range of Data Frame Using as.Date() Function & Logical Operators

In this example, I’ll show how to select data frame rows based on a specific date range.

The first step for this is that we have to check whether our date column has the Date class:

class(data$date)                               # Check class of date column
# [1] "character"

In our case, the date column has the character class. For that reason, we have to apply the as.Date function to convert our column to the data type Date:

data$date <- as.Date(data$date)                # Convert character to date

Let’s check the class of our updated date column:

class(data$date)                               # Check class of date column
# [1] "Date"

The RStudio console returns the data type Date – looks good.

Next, we can use logical operators to keep only rows that lie within a data range:

data_new <- data[data$date > "2021-01-01" &    # Extract data frame subset
                   data$date < "2024-01-01", ]
data_new                                       # Print new data frame

table 2 data frame subset data frame between two dates r

Table 2 shows the output of the previous R code: A subset of our input data frame with rows in a certain date range.

Video & Further Resources

Do you want to learn more about data frames and dates? Then you might have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I’m explaining the R codes of this tutorial:

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Besides that, you could have a look at the related posts that I have published on this website.

You have learned in this article how to extract certain data frame rows based on a sequence of dates in a column in R programming. Please let me know in the comments section, in case you have further questions.

4 Comments. Leave new

Saima

February 8, 2023 8:56 am

Consider that my data frame has two columns. Time appears in the first column. I create time as follows:
start_date <- as.Date("2018/01/01")
time <- seq(start_date, by = "day", length.out = 20)
the second column's name as "value." How can I make a subset of a data frame that only contains the month of January?

Cansu (Statistics Globe)

February 8, 2023 9:36 am

Hello Saima,

I suggest the following solution:

library(lubridate)
 
start_date <- as.Date("2018/01/01")
 
data<-data.frame(time=seq(start_date, by = "week", length.out = 20),
                 month=month(seq(start_date, by = "week", length.out = 20)))
head(data)
#         time month
# 1 2018-01-01     1
# 2 2018-01-08     1
# 3 2018-01-15     1
# 4 2018-01-22     1
# 5 2018-01-29     1
# 6 2018-02-05     2
 
data_sub<-data[data$mont==1,]
data_sub
#         time month
# 1 2018-01-01     1
# 2 2018-01-08     1
# 3 2018-01-15     1
# 4 2018-01-22     1
# 5 2018-01-29     1