Note that the operation can be telescoped, thus
making less use of variables that will not
be needed for later work. A nod also to Eric
Wruck who points that you probably would prefer
-year- to be numeric.
gen year = real(substr(datetime, strpos(datetime," ") - 4, 4))
Nick
[email protected]
Svend Juul replied to I. Mosca
> we have an entry that looks like the following:
> 1-1-2002 00:00:00
> It is a string variable str19 %19s.
>
> We'd like to transform it into a numerical/date format, but the
> information we want to keep is only the year.
> How can we do that?
> -----------
>
> Looking at your date format it seems that the year precedes the first
> blank in the string. I create two observations, identify the
> position of
> the first blank character with strpos(), and use that in the substr()
> function.
>
> clear
> input str19 datetime
> "1-1-2002 00:00:00"
> "10-12-1998 13:32:17"
> end
>
> gen x = strpos(datetime," ")
> gen year = substr(datetime, x-4, 4)
>
> In Stata 8 it is not strpos(), but index():
> gen x = index(datetime," ")
>
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