Re: st: Lots of date vars from month, day, year vars-FU qx forEric Wruck

[Clare L Maxwell <maxwellcl1@earthlink.net>]

Hello, Eric.  Thank you very much for thinking about this.

At 2:02 PM -0500 11/12/05, Eric G. Wruck wrote:
> I'm not sure I fully understand what you're looking to do (more 
> detail would increase the likelihood that someone will be able to 
> help you).  Nevertheless, you may be interested in Stata's mdy() 
> function.
Yes, the mdy() function is what I can use on three variables at a 
time.  The problem is that I have as many as 50 triplets of m, d, y 
that I would like to feed into some kind of automated routine to 
create 50 corresponding date vars.  Calculation of dates is the 
simplest problem of this structure to describe, but there are others 
less trivial, and that is what is really holding me up.


> Eric
>
> p.s.  If you have lots of different m, d, & y variables, you may 
> want to learn about foreach or forvalues depending on how your 
> variables are named.
I have done my best to see how foreach could be adapted to this 
problem.  It is possible that if I understood macros better it would 
help.  A miniature version of what I am talking about would be 
variables mo1, mo2, day1, day2, yr1, yr2, hoping to use them to 
calculate dt1, dt2, without two statements gen dt1 = 
mdy(mo1,day1,yr1) and gen dt2 = mdy(mo2,day2,yr2).  I'd like to be 
able to say something like

foreach w of varlist mo1 mo2
 and each x of varlist day1 day2
 and each y of varlist yr1 yr2
 and each z of newlist dt1 dt2 {
gen z = mdy(w,x,y)
}

Any idea how I could go about this?

Thank you so much!

				Yours truly,
				Clare Maxwell
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/