A favourite overlooked tidyverse function of mine is %m+% from #lubridate which allows you to do maths with dates, whilst accounting for the fact that time periods are not uniform (not all years have 365 days, months differ in length etc).

lubridate::%m+%.md

Adding a month on with a '+' is fairly straightforward.

Code:

library(lubridate)
ymd("2018-01-01") + months(1)

Output:

[1] "2018-02-01"

Using %m+% doesn't appear to be doing any different in this case.

Code:

ymd("2018-01-01") %m+% months(1)

Output:

[1] "2018-02-01"

However in this example, we fail to add a month on as there is no 31st of February.

Code:

ymd("2018-01-31") + months(1)

Output:

[1] NA

Therefore, we need to use the %m+% operator instead.

Code:

ymd("2018-01-31") %m+% months(1)

Output:

[1] "2018-02-28"