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

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

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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