Nathalie, your method of sending sample data is fine.
dt = structure(list(prochi = c("ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1", "ind_1"), date_1st_event = structure(c(14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784, 14784 ), class = "Date"), bp_date = structure(c(12660, 14571, 13392, 13080, 12012, 13080, 13894, 14622, 12654, 13894), class = "Date"), SBP = c(135L, 160L, 135L, 153L, 150L, 153L, 151L, 126L, 150L, 151L), DBP = c(85L, 80L, NA, 79L, 82L, 79L, 76L, 60L, 82L, 91L)), .Names = c("prochi", "date_1st_event", "bp_date", "SBP", "DBP"), row.names = 108:117, class = "data.frame") # The most recent date iRecent = which.max(dt$bp_date) # index of record with most recent date dt[iRecent,] # ind_1 2010-06-24 2010-01-13 126 60 # To Paul Hiemstra: we have the integer representation of date here as.integer(dt$bpdate[iRecent]) I believe that the description of your problem is not complete (homework?), because there is only on subject and one 1st event. So please try to restate the rest of the problem. Dieter -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Finding-the-two-most-recent-dates-tp2528185p2528346.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.