Age in Years of Individuals

Calculates age in years based on a reference date, which is the system date at default.

Usage

age(x, reference = Sys.Date(), exact = FALSE, na.rm = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

x

date(s), character (vectors) will be coerced with as.POSIXlt()

reference

reference date(s) (defaults to today), character (vectors) will be coerced with as.POSIXlt()

exact

a logical to indicate whether age calculation should be exact, i.e. with decimals. It divides the number of days of year-to-date (YTD) of x by the number of days in the year of reference (either 365 or 366).

na.rm

a logical to indicate whether missing values should be removed

...

arguments passed on to as.POSIXlt(), such as origin

Value

An integer (no decimals) if exact = FALSE, a double (with decimals) otherwise

Details

Ages below 0 will be returned as NA with a warning. Ages above 120 will only give a warning.

This function vectorises over both x and reference, meaning that either can have a length of 1 while the other argument has a larger length.

See also

To split ages into groups, use the age_groups() function.

Examples

# 10 random pre-Y2K birth dates
df <- data.frame(birth_date = as.Date("2000-01-01") - runif(10) * 25000)

# add ages
df$age <- age(df$birth_date)

# add exact ages
df$age_exact <- age(df$birth_date, exact = TRUE)

# add age at millenium switch
df$age_at_y2k <- age(df$birth_date, "2000-01-01")

df
#>    birth_date age age_exact age_at_y2k
#> 1  1938-04-01  84  84.87123         61
#> 2  1945-04-03  77  77.86575         54
#> 3  1994-11-17  28  28.24110          5
#> 4  1996-04-21  26  26.81644          3
#> 5  1944-03-24  78  78.89315         55
#> 6  1953-12-31  69  69.12055         46
#> 7  1949-06-18  73  73.65753         50
#> 8  1987-12-09  35  35.18082         12
#> 9  1974-06-29  48  48.62740         25
#> 10 1986-05-23  36  36.72877         13