Finding the days between 2 days using functions in R and condensing the vector

Question

So I need to create a function that take a number of dates, n, and creates a new vector with date ranges, n-1, and the different in number of days between those dates ranges.

c("Jan. 20, 2009", "July 20, 1969", "June 28, 1914", "July 14, 1789", "Oct. 
14, 1066"))
Time differences in days
10/14/1066-7/14/1789  7/14/1789-6/28/1914  6/28/1914-7/20/1969 
          263979                45638                20111 
7/20/1969-1/20/2009 
           14429

This is what I have so far. I'm struggling to find a way to iterate and create a shorter vector. I already reformatted the dates, but I can't figure out how to concatenate the dates in ranges and get the counts of the days in those date ranges. I'm trying class(d) below in the code but it's not working.

days_between = function(v) {
    sort(mdy(v))
    d = ymd("1066-10-14") - ymd("1789-07-14") 
    class(d)
}

Hopefully this is specific enough and makes sense. Thanks.

Answer 1

    x = c("Jan. 20, 2009", "July 20, 1969", "June 28, 1914", "July 14, 1789", "Oct. 
    14, 1066")

    d = lubridate::mdy(x)
    d = d[order(d)]
    result = diff(d)
    labels = format(d, "%m/%d/%Y")
    names(result) = paste(head(labels, -1), labels[-1], sep = "-")
    result
    Time differences in days
    # 10/14/1066-07/14/1789 07/14/1789-06/28/1914 06/28/1914-07/20/1969 07/20/1969-01/20/2009 
    #                263979                 45638                 20111                 14429