[danishussalam]

It is 1096 but when I use the command convertCMC, it gives different dates. I use convertCMC to convert century month codes into Stata dates which I can then use to create the variable Ramadan. I believe Stata can't read dates in cmc format so one first needs to convert them into dates that Stata can read, it's for this reason why i use convertCMC first.

[Rich Goldstein]

as per the FAQ, please explain where the convertcmc command comes from (it appears that command may be at least part of the issue)

[danishussalam]

Rich Goldstein - I found the command on the internet as one of the ways to convert cmc dates to Stata dates. I installed it simply by using ssc install convertCMC

Ian Timaeus from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine wrote it. That's all i know about the command. If there's another more preferred way to change dates, I'd love to hear it?

[Nick Cox]

search convertcmc

in Stata yields nothing. I found this from a Google

https://datacompass.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/2446/

Alternative Title

BugBunny/convertCMC: Convert century month codes to Stata dates

Description


Stata package to convert century month codes (CMCs) into Stata dates. CMCs (i.e. dates coded as months since the start of the year 1900), are widely used by the Demographic and Health Surveys program and others. convertCMC can randomly impute an exact day of the month to each date. This avoids (at least in aggregate) the biases that can arise when doing arithmetic with CMCs. For example, a child that was born in January 2013, whose mother was interviewed in January 2018, may have been either 4 or 5 completed years old at that time depending on whether the mother was interviewed before or after the child's birthday. convertCMC takes into account the length of each month and knows about leap years.

There are two key problems now raised -- I did not try to read the help file or look at the code

1. There isn't enough detail in monthly dates to be certain all the time whether a date was within Ramadan or not.

2. This statement otherwise seems to hint at the problem you're experiencing.

convertCMC can randomly impute an exact day of the month to each date.

[Nick Cox]

I can't see any convertcmc on SSC;

If CMC times are months since the start of 1900, then they are 720 (60 * 12) more than Stata monthly dates.