Renaming date variables

[Tor Haug Anonsen]

Hello gang

I'm trying to fix such that my date variable, specifically the one showing month, looks a little "cleaner". Initially I had a date variable that showed the date that an insurance customer set up an insurance offer: "date_insurance_offer". I then used this to make two new variables showing the dates in months and quarters by writing the code:

generate insurance_offer_month = mofd(date_insurance_offer)
format insurance_offer_month %tm
generate insurance_offer_quarter = qofd(date_insurance_offer)
format insurance_offer_quarter %tq

Now the variable showing the quarters is fine, but the variable showing the months is showing 2020m1 for january 2020, 2020m2 for february 2020 etc. What i wanted to do is to make the variable "insurance_offer_month" show the months as they are named. For example 2020m1 would preferably be 2020jan, 2020m2 would be 2020feb etc, or something similar.

Is this possible somehow?

Appreciate any help!

[Nick Cox]

Renaming is not what you want. You want a different display format.

help datetime display formats


. di %tmCCYYmon ym(2020, 1)
2020jan

[Tor Haug Anonsen]

Renaming is not what you want. You want a different display format.

help datetime display formats


. di %tmCCYYmon ym(2020, 1)
2020jan

Thank you, Nick. That worked! And also thank you for the "groups" module. It displays my data a lot better than tabulate does most of the time.

[Nick Cox]

Thanks for the thanks, but groups (Stata Journal) doesn't do anything special about date variables, so if there is any credit for that it belongs to list.

[Tor Haug Anonsen]

No, I know. This was just because i saw you wrote a very good description of "groups", which i have used quite a lot.

[Tor Haug Anonsen]

Thanks for the thanks, but groups (Stata Journal) doesn't do anything special about date variables, so if there is any credit for that it belongs to list.

Hi again

Thought I would just ask on this post instead of making a new one;
I was wondering if there is any options in the "groups" code to make the variable name appear in its full name/size. Any variable name that is over 6 characters just get a "~x" where "x" represents the last character of the variable name (as shown below). I know that there are options like "varwidth" that would solve this with other types of descriptive codes, but it is not an option for "groups".

Do you have any suggestions?

[Nick Cox]

#6 should have been the start of a new thread -- it's nothing to do with the thread title -- but groups allows list options to meet this need:

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 automobile data)

. rename foreign foreignmeansoutsideUS

. groups foreign

  +-------------------------------------+
  | foreig~S   Freq.   Percent      %<= |
  |-------------------------------------|
  | Domestic      52     70.27    70.27 |
  |  Foreign      22     29.73   100.00 |
  +-------------------------------------+
.
. groups foreign, abbrev(21)

  +--------------------------------------------------+
  | foreignmeansoutsideUS   Freq.   Percent      %<= |
  |--------------------------------------------------|
  |              Domestic      52     70.27    70.27 |
  |               Foreign      22     29.73   100.00 |
  +--------------------------------------------------+

[Tor Haug Anonsen]

#6 should have been the start of a new thread -- it's nothing to do with the thread title -- but groups allows list options to meet this need:

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 automobile data)

. rename foreign foreignmeansoutsideUS

. groups foreign

+-------------------------------------+
| foreig~S Freq. Percent %<= |
|-------------------------------------|
| Domestic 52 70.27 70.27 |
| Foreign 22 29.73 100.00 |
+-------------------------------------+
.
. groups foreign, abbrev(21)

+--------------------------------------------------+
| foreignmeansoutsideUS Freq. Percent %<= |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| Domestic 52 70.27 70.27 |
| Foreign 22 29.73 100.00 |
+--------------------------------------------------+

For some reason i did not get a notification for this. Thank you for the answer, this worked perfectly!

[Nick Cox]

Thanks for the thanks. You' would get an email notification of an answer if and only if you had subscribed to the thread (or to everything).