Convert quarterly string to Stata date

[Colton Tousey]

Hello,

This may be really simple and I am just missing something from other examples I have seen, but I have a quarter string variable:

clear
input str7 qtr
"Q1 2016"
"Q2 2016"
"Q3 2016"
"Q4 2016"
end

gen newqtr = quarterly(qtr, "QY")

But when I try generating the newqtr variable I just get missing values, I have seen a similar example where the quarter was formatted like "2016 Q1" and they could use the quarterly() function with the mask being "YQ". Do I need to have my quarter variable reformatted for this to work? The data I get just gives it to me in this format so I was hoping I could just go straight into the conversion.

Thank you in advance,

Colton Tousey

P.S. I am still using Stata14

[Nick Cox]

quarterly(substr(qtr, 2, .), "QY") works. In other words, you have to ignore the "Q".

From experience I'd say that the quarterly() and monthly() functions fail more easily than daily().

numdate (SSC) does a little better with the use of an undocumented option:

numdate q foo = qtr, pattern(QY) clean

[Colton Tousey]

Thank you, Nick. I generally get dates in excel format, so I have been able to use the date() function and then convert from daily to quarterly with relatively no problems. This data just happens to give me this string.