Re: st: diff data types for date var while importing from various sources

[Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 5:59 PM, tashi lama wrote:
>    When I use odbc command to import data variable from sql database into stata, date variable turns numeric datatype. Quite contrary, when I use stockquote to import data variable to stata from yahoo finace, it assigns string datatype to date. Any idea or cOuld someone point me to a documentation how stata assigns datatype to imported variable specifically date?

I would say this is not a problem with Stata but with the original
data. If a variable is a string in the original dataset, than Stata
has no way of knowing that it is some special type of string (e.g. a
date), so it will correctly import the string variable as a string and
leaves it up to you to convert it into a date (see: -help datetime-).

-- Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany


http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------

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