Re: st: minor annoyance

[Nick Winter <nwinter@virginia.edu>]

If you are doing this, even better would be to include the following in 
profile.do

global today date("\`c(current_date)'","DMY")

Note the backslash before the open-single-quote (`), which means the 
global macro contains the literal string `c(current_date)' which is 
evaluated every time the global is called, rather than containing the 
value of c(current_date) at the time you assign the global.

Then $today will give you the date number, and it will work even if 
you've been running Stata since yesterday.

You can see what's "really" in $today with -macro list-:

. mac list today
today:          date("`c(current_date)'","DMY")

. di $today
17751

. di %d $today
07aug2008

--Nick Winter

David Radwin wrote:

> Jeph,
>
> If you frequently need today's date formatted as a Stata date value or 
> some other specific format like the one below, you might find it 
> convenient to make a global macro like $today in your profile.do file.
>
> The risk would be that if you leave your computer (and Stata) on 
> overnight, the macro would refer to an earlier date.
>
> David
>
> At 8:58 AM -0400 8/7/08, Jeph Herrin wrote:
>
> > Even if one isn't using it to compare with a date
> > variable, one usually wants to reformat before using,
> > and converting to a date value is the easiest way
> > to proceed, eg,
> >
> > local today=string(date("`c(current_date)'","DMY"),"%tdCCYY.NN.DD")
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Nicholas Winter                                 434.924.6994 t
Assistant Professor                             434.924.3359 f
Department of Politics                  nwinter@virginia.edu e
University of Virginia          faculty.virginia.edu/nwinter w
PO Box 400787, 100 Cabell Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22904

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