RE: st: best practice for dates and times

["Liao, Junlin" <junlin-liao@uiowa.edu>]

Nick,

Thank you for the reply. I had read and tried to use the blog post you suggested. That's why I finally choose to simply use string variable to import dates and times. Then you can forget about all the differences in different packages. One caveat, the issue of float vs. double also plays here. The float data type will misrepresent the times for certain values. The actual difference may be in seconds or mili-seconds, but there will be a visual difference when formatted in a meaningful way.

Junlin


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 2:10 PM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: best practice for dates and times

That's 5 date-time columns, not 4.

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> The solution depends on the problem. Sometimes, it is easier to import
> numeric variables and then convert them to Stata dates. This can be
> very easy. See for example
>
> http://blog.stata.com/2011/01/05/using-dates-and-times-from-other-soft
> ware/
>
> Sometimes it is easier to import string variables (which I take it is
> what you mean by "text format") and convert them.
>
> I don't think there is any general better or best solution
> independently of how the dates are presented to you and what you want
> to do with them.
>
> Most of the complexity is apparent rather than real. The main
> difficulty is wading through the documentation to find the function
> you need. Once you've found a solution, it is easy to repeat it.
>
> Recently I was working with a dataset in which there were four data
> columns, Julian date, year, month and day and hour. The people I was
> working with didn't care about Julian date, so the main business was
> to apply -mdy()- and then -format-. Hour was just 0 or 12, so the most
> practical way forward was just to add 0.5 when the measurements were
> taken at midday.
>
> Nick
>
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Liao, Junlin <junlin-liao@uiowa.edu> wrote:
>> I find that transfer data with dates and times is rather complicated with Stata. Lately I found that importing dates and times in text format and then converting with Stata functions would be the simplest approach. I'd like to hear if others have better solutions.
>

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