[R] Getting the numeric value of difftime

[Christian Neumann]

Hi folks,

I have a small, maybe newbie, question concerning date operations.
The follwing snippet

date1 = "2005-11-20";
date2 = "2005-11-17";
difftime(date1, date2)

results in "Time difference of 3 days". How can I extract just the 
numerical value 3?
As a workaround I apply mean() on the result which gives me just a 
numerical value.

Thanks a lot,

Christian