calculating time difference between 201912 and JOIN_YM variables

Question

• I have some data table which looks like this. [DATA] Customer ID : 1255455 , 5258545 , 227484, 25485418 , 3745648 ..... SEX : 1 , 1 , 2, 1 , 2 ..... JOIN_YM : 200608 , 201802 ,20170408, 201104 , 201009 .....

  I just want to calculate the time difference between "2019/12/30" and the variables "JOIN_YM" In conclusion, I want to calculate the time spanned.

  Could you help me how to calculate this for using R programming.

Answer 1

Overall, calculating a timedifference can be obtained using difftime function (you can change the unit to your liking) . For parsing dates, I would suggest the lubridate package.

data <- data.frame(JOIN_YN="201802")
data %>% 
  mutate(
    timeSpanned = difftime(
      lubridate::ymd("2019-12-30"), 
      lubridate::ymd(paste0(JOIN_YN, "01")), 
      units = "days"
      )
    )