r - Adding 15 business days in lubridate

Question

I have a long list of start dates of a certain procedure. Rules require the procedure to be completed in, at most, 6 business days. I wish to compute the deadline.

Using lubridate in R, I can get a six-day deadline thus

> library(lubridate)
> date.in <- dmy(c("30-8-2001", "12-1-2003", "28-2-2003", "20-5-2004"))
> date.in
[1] "2001-08-30 UTC" "2003-01-12 UTC" "2003-02-28 UTC" "2004-05-20 UTC"
> deadline.using.days <- date.in + days(6)
> deadline.using.days
[1] "2001-09-05 UTC" "2003-01-18 UTC" "2003-03-06 UTC" "2004-05-26 UTC"

Is there an easy way to add six business days --- i.e., skipping Saturdays and Sundays? Thank you.

Answer 1

The package bizdays has the function offset which offsets the given dates by a number of business days. It relies on the calendar you define and of course you can define a calendar where weekends are the only nonworking days.

Here is an example:

library(lubridate)
library(bizdays)
cal <- Calendar(weekdays=c('saturday', 'sunday'))
date.in <- dmy(c("30-8-2001", "12-1-2003", "28-2-2003", "20-5-2004"))
bizdays::offset(date.in, 6, cal)

# [1] "2001-09-07" "2003-01-21" "2003-03-10" "2004-05-28"

2018 Update

The function Calendar in bizdays has been renamed to create.calendar, but (in April 2018) a warning is no longer issued.

The code should now be slightly different:

library(lubridate)
library(bizdays)
create.calendar(name="mycal", weekdays=c('saturday', 'sunday'))
date.in <- dmy(c("30-8-2001", "12-1-2003", "28-2-2003", "20-5-2004"))
bizdays::offset(date.in, 6, "mycal")

# [1] "2001-09-07" "2003-01-21" "2003-03-10" "2004-05-28"