see -help dates_and_times##str2num-
HTH
Martin
_______________________
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nishant Dass" <[email protected]>
To: "STATA Help" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 9:16 PM
Subject: st: changing format
Hi,
I am using Stata 10.0 for Windows and I have a small question about the 
"format" of variables:
I have several date variables that appear as string variables in my Stata 
dataset (reported as "31JAN2008", for instance):
             storage  display     value
variable name   type   format      label      variable label
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
maturitydate    str9   %9s                    MaturityDate
offerdate       str9   %9s                    OfferDate
I need to find the duration between these two dates so I am trying to 
change them to a date format as follows:
. format maturitydate offerdate %td
But I get the following error:
"string %fmt required for string variables"
Could someone tell how can I change string variables to dates?
Thank you!
Nishant
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