Find first Tuesday of Month - r

Question

I am trying to write a function which takes a vector of dates as an input and returns a vector of dates -- where the output is the date of the first Tuesday of the month which matches the input date.
So 2012-11-19 --> 2012-11-06, etc.
I have had some success with a single date, but have not been able to generalise to the vector case. Could someone please help?
This is what I have so far:
firstTuesday <- function(tt){
ct <- as.POSIXct(tt)
lt <- as.POSIXlt(tt)
firstOf <- as.POSIXlt(ct - 60*60*24* (lt$mday - 1))
if (firstOf$wday > 2)
{
adjDays <- (9 - firstOf$wday)
firstTues <- as.POSIXlt(as.POSIXct(firstOf) + 60*60*24*adjDays)
}
else {
adjDays <- (2 - firstOf$wday)
firstTues <- as.POSIXlt(as.POSIXct(firstOf) + 60*60*24*adjDays)
}
return(firstTues)
}
Which works for a single date: firstTuesday(Sys.Date()) but yielded junk for vectors of dates (due to issues with if not being a vectorised control operator, i think).
I got around my limited understanding by using indexing. The following code seems to do the trick.
firstTuesday <- function(tt){
ct <- as.POSIXct(tt)
lt <- as.POSIXlt(tt)
firstOf <- as.POSIXlt(ct - 60*60*24* (lt$mday - 1))
firstTue <- as.POSIXct(firstOf)
idx <- firstOf$wday > 2
firstTue[idx] <- as.POSIXct(firstOf[idx]) + 60*60*24*(9 - firstOf$wday[idx])
firstTue[!idx] <- as.POSIXct(firstOf[!idx]) + 60*60*24*(2 - firstOf$wday[!idx])
return(firstTue)
}

Answer 1

This uses lubridate and makes the logic a little simpler. Given a vector of dates the second function will return a vector of characters, similar to your input. You can change things around to suit your needs.
library(lubridate)
getTuesday = function(x) {
date = ymd(x)
first = floor_date(date,"month")
dow = sapply(seq(0,6),function(x) wday(first+days(x)))
firstTuesday = first + days(which(dow==3)-1)
return(firstTuesday)
}
getMultipleTuesdays = function(y) {
tmp = lapply(y, getTuesday)
tmp = lapply(tmp, as.character)
return(unlist(tmp))
}
Edit
Sample input/output
getMultipleTuesdays(c("2012-11-19","2012-11-19","2011-01-15"))
[1] "2012-11-06" "2012-11-06" "2011-01-04"

Answer 2

Here's a simple solution using base functions:
firstDayOfMonth <- function(dates, day="Mon", abbreviate=TRUE) {
# first 7 days of month
s <- lapply(as.Date(format(dates,"%Y-%m-01")), seq, by="day", length.out=7)
# first day of month
d <- lapply(s, function(d) d[weekdays(d,abbreviate)==day])
# unlist converts to atomic, so use do.call(c,...) instead
do.call(c, d)
}
Well, maybe the do.call at the end isn't so simple... but it's a handy piece of knowledge. :)
R> d <- as.Date(c("2012-11-19","2012-11-19","2011-01-15"))
R> firstDayOfMonth(d, "Tuesday", FALSE)
[1] "2012-11-06" "2012-11-06" "2011-01-04"