Brad De Groot wrote:
Would someone please direct me to descriptions of how to handle
timestamps and times? I'm trying to use transaction timestamps from a
relational database to display circadian patterns for system utilization
through different interfaces and form factors. I htought it would be
straightforward, but I have found the right sections of documentation or
statalist archives.
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-egen- has some time commands via the -egenmore- package (available from
SSC). Kit Baum just posted that he's updated a couple of his contributions
to the package in a couple of the commands that he contributed to it.
There's also a, uh, timely article by Nick Cox on the topic in the current
issue of _The Stata Journal_. The electronic version of the issue's just
come out this morning.
If you retrieve the timestamps in ISO 8601 format, then the data will sort
correctly naturally as a string, and you can use either -split-, parsing on
the "T", or -substr()- to get time alone for circadian analysis. You can
use one of the commands mentioned in the article to convert to
numeric--fraction of the day, seconds from midnight, etc., although it's not
difficult to do the conversion from scratch.
Joseph Coveney
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