Re: st: dates

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

It looks like your exitdate is actually an encoded string variable and not 
really a Stata date variable.  Try:

label list exitdate
  or
sum exidate

to see if there is a value label that makes it look like it holds dates but the 
true numeric values are not Stata date values.  If so, you may need to decode 
the variable, then apply the date() function to the string variable to re-create 
it as a true date formatted numeric field.

M Blasnik


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "P chrisman" <peggyc@u.washington.edu>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: st: dates



> Dear List
>
> I tried this and keeping getting the message that no changes were made when 
> there are definitely changes that should have been made.
>
>
> . replace exitdate=mdy(12,31,2005) if year(exitdate)==2006
> (0 real changes made)
>
> I do not know what it means but when browsing data the "exitdate" is in blue 
> with dashes and "entrydate" is in black with spaces. The formats are:
>
> describe exitdate entrydate
>
>              storage  display     value
> variable name   type   format      label      variable label
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> exitdate        long   %dD_m_Y     exitdate  entrydate       long   %dD_m_Y
> I am confused why this command in not capturing the dates I need to change.
> Thanks,
> Peggy
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