Return Various Periods from a Chron or Dates Object

Given a chron or dates object, extract the year, quarter, month, day (within the month) or weekday (days within the week) of the date it represents.

days(x)
# Default S3 method
weekdays(x, abbreviate = TRUE)
# Default S3 method
months(x, abbreviate = TRUE)
# Default S3 method
quarters(x, abbreviate = TRUE)
years(x)

Arguments

x

an object inheriting from class "dates", or coercible to such via as.chron.

abbreviate

should abbreviated names be returned? Default is TRUE.

Value

an ordered factor corresponding to days, weekdays, months, quarters, or years of x for the respective function.

Details

Note that months, quarters and weekdays are generics defined in package base which also provides methods for objects of class "Date" as generated, e.g., by Sys.Date. These methods return character rather than factor variables as the default methods in chron do. To take advantage of the latter, Date objects can be converted to dates objects using as.chron, see the examples.

Examples

dts <- dates("07/01/78") + trunc(50 * rnorm(30))
plot(weekdays(dts))

plot(months(dts))


## The day in the current timezone as a Date object.
Dt <- Sys.Date()
## Using the months method for Date objects.
months(Dt)
#> [1] "October"
## Using the months default method.
months(as.chron(Dt))
#> [1] Oct
#> 12 Levels: Jan < Feb < Mar < Apr < May < Jun < Jul < Aug < Sep < ... < Dec