The first principles approach expounded here by
Joseph Coveney (and by Kit Baum in a separate posting)
is always good.
An extra tip is to go straight to [R] split
and look at the discussion there. If the manual
is not to hand, the on-line help includes an
example relevant to the problem here.
Nick
[email protected]
Erica Seiguer
> >I have a date variable which lists dates as
> >
> >MM-DD-YR
> >
> >I want to remove the hyphens/dashes, but can't find anything in any
> >manual about this.
> >
> >Also, sometimes the actual time is also included like:
> >
> >MM-DD-YR HH:MM.
> >
> >In this case, I want to dump the time stamp, and keep the
> date (without
> >the hyphens).
Joseph Coveney
> As you describe the examples, the date variable and date-time
> variable would
> be strings, so you can use Stata's string functions (-help functions-
> or -help strfun-) to remove unwanted characters and to keep a
> specified
> number of characters within the string.
>
> Assuming that there aren't any typographical errors in the
> following, for
> the first case (MM-DD-YR), for a date variable named dashed_date, the
> command would be -generate str6 dedashed_date = subinstr(dashed_date,
> "-","", .)-, and for the second case (MM-DD-YR HH:MM),
> either -generate
> str6 dedashed_detimed_datetime =
> substr(subinstr(dashed_datetime, "-", "",
> .), 1, 6)- or -generate str6 dedashed_detimed_datetime =
> subinstr(substr(dashed_datetime, 1, 8), "-", "", .)-.
>
> You might also be interested in -help dates- and what is
> referenced there.
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