Converting month-year variable

[Lindsey Buck]

Hi all,

I imported an excel sheet with dates like this: "2018m1" but they are in string format. I want them to look the same, but be in the Stata month-year format which is not a string, so I can merge to another file. Can you assist? Thanks!

	
	
* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str7 moyr long households
"2018m1"   959031
"2018m2"   958444
"2018m3"   958651
"2018m4"   958143
"2018m5"   958288
"2018m6"   953940
"2018m7"   952503
"2018m8"   954430
"2018m9"   953467
"2018m10"  953070
"2018m11"  949366
"2018m12"  945533
"2019m1"   945432
"2019m2"    93193
"2019m3"   939194
"2019m4"   938729
"2019m5"   937782
"2019m6"   938895
"2019m7"   941757
"2019m8"   947660
"2019m9"   943248
"2019m10"  944514
"2019m11"  943674
"2019m12"  937337
"2020m1"   938827
"2020m2"   941031
"2020m3"   942908
"2020m4"   995550
"2020m5"  1022787
"2020m6"  1022331
"2020m7"   995866
"2020m8"   997132
"2020m9"  1007323
"2020m10"  999575
"2020m11"  981517
"2020m12"  784598
"2021m1"   974113
"2021m2"   970279
"20201m3"  964654
"2021m4"   962449
"2021m5"   958318
"2021m6"   954489
"2021m7"   958633
"2021m8"   965668
"2021m9"   976812
"2021m10"  976754
"2021m11"  989208
end

[Clyde Schechter]

gen int mdate = monthly(moyr, "YM")
format mdate %tm