How to prevent ifelse() from turning Date objects into numeric objects

Question

I am using the function ifelse() to manipulate a date vector. I expected the result to be of class Date, and was surprised to get a numeric

Answer 1

The reason why this won't work is because, ifelse() function converts the values to factors. A nice workaround would be to convert it to characters before evaluating it.

dates <- as.Date(c('2011-01-01','2011-01-02','2011-01-03','2011-01-04','2011-01-05'))
dates_new <- dates - 1
dates <- as.Date(ifelse(dates =='2011-01-01',as.character(dates_new),as.character(dates)))

This wouldn't require any library apart from base R.