RE: st: RE: Question: date format

[Joe Canner <jcanner1@jhmi.edu>]

Hmmm...Thomas said the variable was already formatted as %tcHH:MM:SS, so I didn't bother to check if that would work.  Perhaps he was mistaken, or perhaps there was more to the story that he didn't tell us about (e.g., how the time variable was originally input), that might have been relevant.



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Sergiy Radyakin
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 9:22 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: RE: Question: date format

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Joe Canner <jcanner1@jhmi.edu> wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> I don't see anything in the documentation about displaying a Stata datetime variable as just a time.  Generally speaking, times without dates are kind of useless, which is probably why they didn't provide for this.

Joe, this is perfectly doable with a custom format:

set obs 10
generate x=1000*_n
format x %tcHH:MM:SS
list

If you want, you can have a format, which displays, e.g. seconds only (format x %tcSS). Whether that makes sense or not, depends on the context.

Best, Sergiy Radyakin


>
> I would suggest you combine the date variable and the time variable into one datetime variable.  Say your original date variable is -date1- and your time variable is -time1-:
>
> . gen datetime1=cofd(date1)+time1
>
> -cofd()- converts your date to a datetime with midnight as the time.  Your time variable is the number of milliseconds past midnight. So, the sum should be a legitimate datetime variable.
>
>  Later, if you need information on just the time you can extract it using the hh(), mm(), and ss() functions.
>
> Regards,
> Joe Canner
> Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu 
> [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas 
> Bourveau
> Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 8:40 AM
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: st: Question: date format
>
> Dear Statalist members,
>
> I obtained data on the timing of some announcements made by firms. For each event, I have two different variables: one variable for the date, and another one for the hours, minutes and seconds of the timing.
>
> However, when I obtained the second variable, it looks like this:
>
> 01jan1960 13:57:54
> 01jan1960 23:17:48
> 01jan1960 08:32:52
>
> Specifically, for each line, "01jan1960" is written before each hours, which was not supposed to be.
>
> The variable is in a long format (%tcHH:MM:SS) and I don't know how to drop the "01jan1960" for each line.
>
> If anyone has a suggestion, that would be nice.
>
> Thanks a in advance
> Best,
> Thomas
>
> --
> Thomas Bourveau
> thomas.bourveau@gmail.com
> 0637573925
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