RE: st: RE: re. strings and non-string: the month case

["PAPANIKOLAOU P." <P.Papanikolaou@swansea.ac.uk>]

Dear All,
Thank you so much.
I have followed your suggestions through: 1. Use the encode with the
generate option, creating a numerical variable.  Use label define and
label values, see below.  Following this, I run the tab command to get
the frequencies, which are presented in the correct order (jan-Dec).
But, when I do label list, I do not understand why the list is in
different order (1 April, 2 August and so forth) and with the full names
of the month. I would have expected to see that the label list would
present the months in the jan-dec order. I am confused why this has
happened. Would you please let me know.  Many thanks, Panos

enc Month, gen(MONTHS_NUM)

label define label_mon 1 "Jan" 2 "Feb" 3 "Mar" 4  "Apr" 5 "May" 6 "Jun"
7 "Jul" 8 "Aug" 9 "Sep" 10 "Oct" 11 "Nov" 12 "Dec"

. label values  MONTHS_NUM label_mon

. tab  MONTHS_NUM

      Month |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
        Jan |        393        8.92        8.92
        Feb |        330        7.49       16.41
        Mar |        340        7.72       24.13
        Apr |        348        7.90       32.03
        May |        379        8.60       40.64
        Jun |        376        8.54       49.17
        Jul |        368        8.35       57.53
        Aug |        418        9.49       67.01
        Sep |        423        9.60       76.62
        Oct |        328        7.45       84.06
        Nov |        347        7.88       91.94
        Dec |        355        8.06      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |      4,405      100.00

. label list MONTHS_NUM
MONTHS_NUM:
           1 April
           2 August
           3 December
           4 February
           5 January
           6 July
           7 June
           8 March
           9 May
          10 November
          11 October
          12 September

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 21 November 2013 16:45
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: RE: re. strings and non-string: the month case

want but what lies underneath will be daily dates, specifically 0, 31,
60, ... That could cause more confusion than it solves.

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 21 November 2013 16:33, Joe Canner <jcanner1@jhmi.edu> wrote:
> Panos,
>
> In addition to Nick's useful explanation of my suggestion, I should
point out that the -encode- suggestion is probably better if you want a
numeric variable with a label.  My suggestion was aimed at a shortcut
that gives you the numeric variable without the label.  It is not as
useful for creating the label (except possibly if you concatenate the
number to the beginning of the string before encoding).
>
> Following on with Nick's explanation, another possibility here (which
I wouldn't necessary recommend, but which is interesting and instructive
nonetheless) is:
> . gen mydate=date(month,"M")
> . format mydate %td_Month
>
> Regards,
> Joe
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu 
> [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
> Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:22 AM
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: Re: st: RE: re. strings and non-string: the month case
>
> understanding what it does and doesn't do is important.
>
> Joe is creating a daily date from monthly information alone and then
extracting the month. That works because it is what is wanted, but the
dates themselves are 1 Jan 1960, 1 Feb 1960, and so forth as without a
day of the month Stata assumes 1 and without a year it assumes 1960.
> You discard that day and year  information in this case, but know how
the trick was done.
>
> Nick
> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>
>
> On 21 November 2013 16:04, Joe Canner <jcanner1@jhmi.edu> wrote:
>> Panos,
>>
>> In conjunction with -encode-, as suggested by Richard Goldstein, you
might want to use the following statement to convert month names to
month numbers:
>>
>> . gen month_num=month(date(MONTH,"M"))
>
> PAPANIKOLAOU P.
>
>> I have got a string variable: MONTH, where records the months of the
year (e.g., January, February and so forth) on micro-data basis.
>> Would you please assist me how best I would attach a set of label
values where 1 refers to January, 2 is for February and so forth.
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