Dave Ewart wrote:
Ah, interesting: that certainly appears to work, in the sense that it
reads in the dates as strings.
However, this doesn't actually give you 'proper' date variables, does
it? I realise one can string-splice to pull out the components of the
date, but that's rather tedious.
[excerpted]
Can you suggest a way to 'transparently' import these dates as 'proper'
date variables? Or at least a way to easily re-type the imported
strings as dates?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Starting with a date variable imported as a string, e.g.,
set obs 1
generate str c = "2004-01-01 19:27:03" ,
then you can re-type it in two lines of code:
generate int c_date = date(substr(c, 1, 10), "ymd")
format c_date %dCY-N-D
If you have a lot of such variables, then use -foreach var of varlist-. An
ado-file could be easily written around this that would automate this for a
variable list and it could either replace the original string variable with
a date-formated integer variable, or generate new variables with a default
stub or suffix or an optional one.
Check the summary of available commands posted by Nick Cox at the end of
January 2003 www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2003-01/msg00592.html More
might have become available since then; check around. There are
user-written programs for dates, times and the like, and one might be
available to do this.
Joseph Coveney
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