Generating Random Dates

How can I generate a set of 12 random dates within a specific date range?

I thought the following would work:

 sample(as.Date(1999/01/01), as.Date(2000/01/01),12)

But the result looks like a random set of numbers?

Thank you

Solution 1:

seq has a method for class Date which works for this:

sample(seq(as.Date('1999/01/01'), as.Date('2000/01/01'), by="day"), 12)

Solution 2:

Several ways:

1. Start with a single Date object, and just add result from sample()

2. Start with a sequence of Date objects, and sample() it.

Here is 1:

R> set.seed(42)   
R> res <- Sys.Date() + sort(sample(1:10, 3))
R> res
[1] "2014-02-04" "2014-02-10" "2014-02-11"
R> 

Solution 3:

td = as.Date('2000/01/01') - as.Date('1999/01/01')
as.Date('1999/01/01') + sample(0:td, 12)