RE: st: imputing dates into a string date

[Tim Evans <Tim.Evans@wmciu.nhs.uk>]

Perhaps I am missing something here.

When I have the following dates in Stata:

var1
01/xx/2001
xx/01/2001
01/01/xxxx

and use the code 

g dx_clean = subinstr(var1, "xx", "01", 1)

I get:

var1	dx_clean
01/xx/2001	01/01/2001
xx/01/2001	01/01/2001
01/01/xxxx	01/01/01xx

The problem seems that both the month gets imputed and also the first part of the missing year.

So I still prefer Nicks original example.

Best wishes

Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 07 June 2012 15:35
To: 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'
Subject: RE: st: imputing dates into a string date

I wouldn't do precisely that. There might be dates with missing months too, for all we know. That code would replace "XX/XX" with "01/01". Replacing a missing day with 1 is one thing; replacing a missing month with January messes up the data. So, ever picky, I recommend instead

g dx_clean = subinstr(dx, "XX", "01", 1)

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

daniel klein

this is (probably) much simpler than you might assume. All you need to
type is the one line

g dx_clean = subinstr(dx, "XX", "01", .)


Substitute -g dx_clean- in the code with -replace dx- if you want to
change your original variable.

Hi all,
[...]
This is working fine, until I come across a date that actually starts like this:

xx/01/2010

Then my code to generate a date returns a blank. What I would like to
do is add in something that allows me to evaluate whether the day is
xx and if so, insert 01.

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