Re: st: date(s1,s2) leads to no values

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@stata.com>]

As Rich Goldstein suggested, the user-written program -todate- from SSC 
is one solution for your problem. However, Rich did not suggest 
following with -tostring- and I can't see that to be a good idea. Once 
you have an integer date variable, the natural thing to do is to format 
it as a date variable. Indeed -todate- has an option to do that.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

Fabian Brenner


> But Richard's solution did work.
> -todate statpers_as_string, gen(num_date) p(yyyymmdd)-
> -tostring num_date-
Richard Goldstein

> > > If I remember correctly, version 8 could not deal with run-together
> > dates
> > > like this
> > >
> > > download the -todate- file from ssc (when connected to the internet,
> > type
> > > -ssc install todate- on the Stata command line)
Fabian Brenner

> > > > variable "date" is str8   %9s (one example:19861230). I would like to
> > use
> > > > gen begin=date(date,"YMD") to get elapsed dates but stata does not put
> > any
> > > > values in variable "begin" (only missings).
> > > >
> > > > I use stata 8.
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