Name a fiscal year by the years it spans

Turns fiscal years keyed by their END year into labels that name both calendar years. Ontario's inmate data (and many government series) key on the fiscal year's end year, so 2023 is the fiscal year running from April 2022 to March 2023; this renders that as "2022/23", which a reader cannot mistake for the calendar year 2023. Pass it to yoylbl() to label a change table.

Usage

fylbl(endyear, sep = "/", short = TRUE)

Arguments

endyear

The fiscal year's end year, as a whole number or a string; a vector of them.

sep

Separator between the two years, a string; default "/".

short

Logical. TRUE (the default) abbreviates the second year to two digits, as in "2022/23"; FALSE writes it in full, as in "2022/2023".

Value

A character vector of labels, the same length as endyear, with NA where a value is not a year.

Details

Each value is converted with as.integer(as.character(endyear)), so a string such as "2023" works; a fractional number is refused rather than truncated (2023.7 is an error). The label is (y - 1), sep, then y itself or its last two digits. Values that cannot be read as a year give NA. The two-digit form is unambiguous within a century (2000 gives "1999/00").

Errors: endyear that is neither numeric nor character (for example logical); a numeric year below 1; a numeric year that is not whole.

Examples

fylbl(2019:2023)
#> [1] "2018/19" "2019/20" "2020/21" "2021/22" "2022/23"

fylbl(2023, short = FALSE)
#> [1] "2022/2023"

fylbl(2023, sep = "-")
#> [1] "2022-23"

# strings work; something that is not a year gives NA
fylbl(c("2023", "n/a", NA))
#> [1] "2022/23" NA        NA       

# logical input is refused
try(fylbl(TRUE))
#> Error : `endyear` must be numeric or character years