Re: st: String -> date format conversion with insheet

[Roger Newson <roger.newson@kcl.ac.uk>]

At 10:52 21/11/03 -0500, Eric Hixson wrote:
> I have a dataset with dates that I am brining into Stata via insheet.  The 
> data is comma delimited and the dates are being formatted by the source 
> database like the following:
>
> 3/12/03 0:00:00
> 11/5/03 0:00:00
>
> Unfortunately I can't get rid of the h/m/sec portion at the source and 
> Stata is formatting the field as a string.  I want to convert the m/d/y 
> portion to a date to allow time series analysis.
>
> I tried dstring as a first step and got the following:
>
> . destring dischdate, g(ddate) ignore(" 0:00:00")
> dischdate contains characters not specified in ignore(); no generate
>
> The same error was produced with and without the quotes and/or leading 
> space in the ignore statement.  Recast does not allow date as a type.
>
> Any thoughts on how to handle the conversion would be appreciated.
Use -split- to split the string into date and time. Then convert the date 
in the usual way.

Roger


--
Roger Newson
Lecturer in Medical Statistics
Department of Public Health Sciences
King's College London
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