Lubridate - how to manipulate date and time data in R

If you're learning R programming and want to manipulate data and time data then the lubridate package is going to rock your world. Its part of the tidyverse collecation of package and so integrates nicely with other tidyverse packages like ggplot2 and dplyr. Lubridate lets you parse strings into date and time objects, extract components of dates and times and even work with timeframes like durations and periods. Typically base R uses as.date() to parse a date object. These usually exist as POSIXct or POSIXlt objects. Lubridate makes all of this much easier with a set of functions that are intuitive and easy to use.