My apologies for my poor articulation.
Suppose I have a variable say jdate
jdate
17890
17891
17892
etc.
so I can say format %td jdate
And the dates look like " Sep 16 1990 " ,etc in a human readable form.
but they only LOOK human readable they have only been displayed like
that, the variable jdate contains the values 17890, etc.
Now if i write jdate to an HTML file whose code is actually a text
file , I would do
file write ( ....... jdate[`i']........... )
where i helps me loop over observations and create a table in HTML.
if jdate is as it is NO MATTER how I have formatted it , my html table
won't have human readable dates, it will have 17890 / 17891 / etc
but if I do -tostring- then the variable not only DISPLAYS as human
readable in stata , it IS actually containng human readable values
and when I write to HTML it will be human readable.
I hope I was more articulate this time.
Thank you,
Ashim
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
-tostring- is objecting because -real("28feb2008")- does not yield
17590.
That objection is irrelevant for your purposes, so you should just add
the -force- option.
Do please notice that I didn't recommend using -tostring-; I recommended
using -string()- directly.
I don't follow your argument about HTML but I will not comment further
on that. It is really is impossible to discuss what you are doing when
the description of your code is merely "it".
Nick
[email protected]
Ashim Kapoor
hi Nick,
Thank you for your email.
I need it to be a string because I want it to be output to HTML. If
the orginal variables is 17590 and display something like " Sep 6
1990" it is useless as when i try writing that variable to an HTML
code it will write 17590 and not Sep 6 1990 which is what I want.
gen k=17590
. format %td k
. l
+-----------+
| k |
|-----------|
1. | 28feb2008 |
2. | 28feb2008 |
3. | 28feb2008 |
4. | 28feb2008 |
5. | 28feb2008 |
+-----------+
. tostring(k) ,format(%td) gen(j)
k cannot be converted reversibly; no generate
This fails. Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you,
Ashim.
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
Using -tostring- would be convenient for several variables, and it
certainly supports a -format()- option. (I am not clear why Jeph
appears
uncertain on that.)
But a lower-level route appears closer to what Ashim wants. That uses
the two-argument flavour of -string(,)-.
To detect what format a variable has you go
local fmt: format mynumvar
gen svar = string(mynumvar, "`fmt'")
Thus no magic is needed, just willingness to read the documentation.
I don't understand why a string variable is needed here. Once a date
has
been displayed in SMCL whether it came from a numeric variable or a
string variable is immaterial, but that is a separate issue.
Nick
[email protected]
Jeph Herrin
I think -tostring- will work with the -format()- option.
Or, if you want to call mata you can use -sprintf()-.
Ashim Kapoor wrote:
This is great. Will do part of what I what . I still need the magic
command to do magic on dates.
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Neil Shephard <[email protected]>
wrote:
Not sure about dates, but for your second example you can do the
following....
gen str magicj = string(round(j, .01))
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