Re: st: appending date variable in 2 datafiles

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Stata prefers daily dates to be numeric variables coded with origin 1
January 1960, so converting all date variables to that form is the way
to go. (The difference you have is of variable or data type, not one
of format in Stata's sense of the word.)

You said that your variable was MDY, in response to which Stata can
make no sense of the 5th day of the 23rd month, etc. But your variable
is evidently DMY.

Nick

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 11:58 AM, <redacted> wrote:

> I have a date variable in a stata datafile :
>
> DATAFILE A
>
>         +-----------+
>         doa
>         -----------
> 1.      14dec2010
> 2.      19dec2010
> 3.      30mar2010
> 4.      16jun2010
> 5.      06jan2010
>         +-----------+
>
> and I have a date variable also in a stata datafile that I would like
> to append to the datafile above (DATAFILE A)
>
> DATAFILE B
>
> +------------------------+
> doa                  date3
> ------------------------
> 1.  23-05-2012           .
> 2.  03-11-2011   11mar2011
> 3.  02-09-2010   09feb2010
> 4.  01-07-2010   07jan2010
> 5.  18-04-2012           .
> +------------------------+
>
> The problem is both datafiles use different format of date, the former
> uses numeric and the latter uses str. My questions would be
> 1) what is the best way to work around appending this two datafiles
> 2) i have converted the 'doa' in the latter file (DATAFILE B) using
>
> generate date3=date(doa,"MDY")
> format date3 %d
>
> but only obs from 2 to 4 were converted but obs 1 and 5 were not.
>
> Really appreciate if someone can help me with these 2 questions.
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