Change minutes from decimal number to minutes:seconds

[Daniel Ramskov]

Hello statalisters


I´ve been struggeling with this one and hope one of you can help.

I currently have a variable (minutes) as a decimal number (25.86667), but would like to get the minutes:seconds. In this case 25.52 min. I´ve been working with floor and round, trying to accomplish this, but so far no luck.

Daniel

[Nick Cox]

I don't know what "get" means here precisely. You can see (using a %tc display format) such a representation if you multiply minutes to get milliseconds as in

. di %tcMM:SS 25.86667 * 60e3
25:52

or you can produce a string as in

. di string(floor(25.86667)) + ":" + string(60 * mod(25.86667, 1), "%2.0f")
25:52

To get a new string variable, I would use the first method, as in

gen sminutes = string(60e3 * minutes, "%tcMM:SS")

for simplicity so long as numbers were less than 60 minutes, and the second method for generality. (How large can your values be?)

[Daniel Ramskov]

Thanks Nick for trying to "get" me what I want.

The variable I´m working with is type numeric (double) and for future calculations this type is optimal. I will try providing an example of the current data set.


id time (time2)
334 25.866667 25.52
334 0 0
334 0 0
334 0 0
334 0 0
334 0 0
334 0 0
334 37.983334 ...........?

The time variable is the decimal number variable, which I´m trying to change to a numeric variable, with the actual minutes and seconds -> time2

Thanks
Daniel

[Nick Cox]

Sorry, but I don't see that you have clarified what you want at all.

You can't or shouldn't want to hold minutes and seconds as a decimal variable. What should that mean? 23.52 means 23 min 52 sec but 24.08 - 23.52 = 0.16? The likelihood of confusing yourself or people who use your data or results is extraordinarily high.

What do you want to do with such a variable?

[Daniel Ramskov]

1.cumulate minutes used over a period of time

2.calculate minutes/km

[Nick Cox]

OK. Both uses imply calculations with times in minutes and either would be messed up by converting mm:ss to mm.ss. At most you can present your final results using a display format as already explained. Keep your variable as it comes.