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Strange dates [was: Re: st: Thread-Index: Ac0vkoq1llKC2ARGRdCKzJ3Uorh9sgCG7a8+]
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Strange dates [was: Re: st: Thread-Index: Ac0vkoq1llKC2ARGRdCKzJ3Uorh9sgCG7a8+]
Date
Mon, 14 May 2012 10:02:07 +0100
A quick calculation underlines that the metric here is not evident.
. di mdy(2,2,2009) - mdy(6,23,1997)
4242
which is much more than the range of 2441 that you give. ("241" I take
to be your typo.) So, it doesn't look as if they are daily dates. (Or,
naturally, monthly, weekly, ....)
Unless someone can recognise the rule or procedure being used here, I
don't think that we can advise you. Without knowing the rule being
used, we can't relate it to any other rule.
You need to go back to the dataset providers. That's my guess.
Nick
On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Amal Khanolkar <[email protected]> wrote:
> I just received a dataset which has a 'date variable in a format I
> haven't come across before. I need help with reformatting this date
> variable so that it's similar to other date variables I have in the
> dataset.
>
> The date variable reads like this when I 'summarize' and 'decribe' it:
>
>
>
> sum inskdat_new
>
> Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
> -------------+--------------------------------------------------------
> inskdat_new | 305358 818.8836 613.712 1 2441
>
> . des inskdat_new
>
> storage display value
> variable name type format label variable label
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> inskdat_new long %d inskdat_new
> enlistment date
>
>
> -As you can see from the above, the date has a min value of 1 that
> corresponds to 1997-06-23 and a maximum value of 241 that corresponds
> to 2009-02-04.
>
> -How do I reformat this variable so that it's a 'float' with %d display
> format and reads like 19feb2010 when I tabulate it and with stata time
> (when checking the minimum & maximum values when I summarize the
> variable)??
>
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