Tony,
If all dates are from 1900 to 1999 you can use the following command
before you convert the dates.
. replace date = substr(date,1,6) + "19" + substr(date,7,2) if length(date) == 8
Friedrich
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Lachenbruch, Peter
<[email protected]> wrote:
> I sent this earlier today, but it didn't appear on the list. Let's try
> again - sometimes my posts don't appear.
>
> I converted an Excel spreadsheet using StatTransfer and all of the
> variables came through as strings. I converted a date variable using
> the command
> gen daten=date(date,"MDY")
> and about half of the dates came through just fine. However, some dates
> did not convert:
> ----------------------|
> 131. | 10/10/1986 9779 |
> 132. | 03/21/1995 12863 |
> 133. | 09/26/1995 13052 |
> 134. | 04/03/1996 13242 |
> 135. | . |
> |----------------------|
> 136. | 09/15/90 . |
> 137. | 03/15/91 . |
> 138. | 12/15/98 . |
> 139. | 07/15/86 . |
> 140. | 02/15/87 . |
> |----------------------|
>
> The left column is the string variable, the right column is the julian
> date (I later convert to a date format, and the ones that do convert are
> correct).
> I thought the problem might be extra spaces, so I tried ltrim and rtrim
> to get rid of them, but it didn't work.
> I suspect others may have seen this problem - it's a pain in the neck to
> do the conversion, but I did it manually.
> Does anyone have an idea what might be happening?
>
> Tony
>
> Peter A. Lachenbruch
> Department of Public Health
> Oregon State University
> Corvallis, OR 97330
> Phone: 541-737-3832
> FAX: 541-737-4001
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