character date to quarters

General
#1

Having a character date column in data frame. I want 8 quarter's data from a desired quarter - 2021-01(1q21)
and count backwards inclusively: 2021-7(3q21) to 2019-10(4q19). how to do it efficiently? Thanks in advance!

prod_id <- c(21,21,21,20,20,20,20,19,19,19,19,18,18,18,18)
start_date <- c('2021-01-1','2021-04-1','2021-07-1',
                '2020-01-1','2020-04-1','2020-07-1','2020-10-1',
                '2019-01-1','2019-04-1','2019-07-1','2019-10-1',
                '2018-01-1','2018-04-1','2018-07-1','2018-10-1')

prod <- data.frame(prod_id, start_date, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) %>% filter(???)
#2

Hi,

I think you can just use the quarters function

library(tidyverse)

#Get the data
prod_id <- c(21,21,21,20,20,20,20,19,19,19,19,18,18,18,18)
start_date <- c('2021-01-1','2021-04-1','2021-07-1',
                '2020-01-1','2020-04-1','2020-07-1','2020-10-1',
                '2019-01-1','2019-04-1','2019-07-1','2019-10-1',
                '2018-01-1','2018-04-1','2018-07-1','2018-10-1')

prod <- data.frame(prod_id, start_date, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

#Add the quarters
prod = prod %>% mutate(quarter = quarters(as.Date(start_date)))

prod
#>    prod_id start_date quarter
#> 1       21  2021-01-1      Q1
#> 2       21  2021-04-1      Q2
#> 3       21  2021-07-1      Q3
#> 4       20  2020-01-1      Q1
#> 5       20  2020-04-1      Q2
#> 6       20  2020-07-1      Q3
#> 7       20  2020-10-1      Q4
#> 8       19  2019-01-1      Q1
#> 9       19  2019-04-1      Q2
#> 10      19  2019-07-1      Q3
#> 11      19  2019-10-1      Q4
#> 12      18  2018-01-1      Q1
#> 13      18  2018-04-1      Q2
#> 14      18  2018-07-1      Q3
#> 15      18  2018-10-1      Q4

Created on 2021-07-21 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)

Hope this helps,
PJ