st: RE: RE: date functions: from monthly to quarterly only through daily?

["Impavido, Gregorio" <GImpavido@imf.org>]

Thank you Nick for the very useful suggestion of testing things first with -display-.

And thank you Tashi for earlier reply.



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 11:45 AM
To: 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'
Subject: st: RE: date functions: from monthly to quarterly only through daily?

As you say, there is no -qofm()- function to do this directly; so you need to do it indirectly. I guess you don't like the rather ugly code that seems to imply,  but it can be simplified a bit as 

gen timem = monthly(date,"MY")
gen timed = dofm(timem) 
gen timeq = qofd(timed)

can be telescoped to 

gen timeq = qofd(dofm(monthly("May2012", "MY")))

as there is no need to invoke functions one at a time, or to create a variable for each step in the calculation. When working out such problems, I usually test with -display-, so that 

. di  %tq qofd(dofm(monthly("May2012", "MY")))
2012q2

indicates that the main idea is right. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Impavido, Gregorio

I have a string variable containing quarterly dates in the form:

. li date

	date 
1.	Dec1977 
2.	Mar1978
.....etc.

I want to convert it into quarterly date (Stata format).  Is there a better way than the following?

* begin code
gen timem = monthly(date,"MY")
gen timed = dofm(timem) 
gen timeq = qofd(timed)
format timeq %tq
* end code

I could not find a -qofm()- function but ideally, I would like to get it in the first line through an the right specification of -quarterly()-

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