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) (default is 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  1980-02-27  45  45.38904         19
#> 2  1953-07-26  71  71.98082         46
#> 3  1949-09-02  75  75.87671         50
#> 4  1986-08-03  38  38.95890         13
#> 5  1932-11-19  92  92.66301         67
#> 6  1949-03-30  76  76.30411         50
#> 7  1996-06-23  29  29.07123          3
#> 8  1963-09-16  61  61.83836         36
#> 9  1952-05-16  73  73.17534         47
#> 10 1952-11-14  72  72.67671         47