Creating a date & time-stamp with particular formatting

[Emma Starr]

I am attempting to create a date & time stamp variable called upload_timestamp that I need to format specifically as "m/d/Y, H:M:S" for the service I am uploading the data too. I am using Stata MP 17.0.

I've created a timestamp using:

gen upload_timestamp = "`c(current_date)'"+"," +"`c(current_time)'"

Which creates:

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str20 upload_timestamp
" 7 Dec 2022,17:21:51"
" 7 Dec 2022,17:21:51"
" 7 Dec 2022,17:21:51"
" 7 Dec 2022,17:21:51"
" 7 Dec 2022,17:21:51"

Which is halfway there, but I am having trouble converting it into the format I require. I tried:

gen upload_timestamp = "`%tdN/D/CY date(c(current_date))'"+"_" +"`c(current_time)'"

but it results in output missing the date half of the timestamp completely:

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str9 upload_timestamp
",17:18:57"
",17:18:57"
",17:18:57"
",17:18:57"
",17:18:57"

Any thoughts on how I can fix this? Thanks in advance!

[Andrew Musau]

What you get with display is a string, so consider

di daily("`c(current_date)'", "DMY")
di  %tdN/D/CY daily("`c(current_date)'", "DMY")

Res.:

. di daily("`c(current_date)'", "DMY")
22986

. di  %tdN/D/CY daily("`c(current_date)'", "DMY")
12/07/2022

[Hemanshu Kumar]

In other words, you need:

gen upload_timestamp = "`:dis %tdN/D/CY date("`c(current_date)'","DMY")'" + ", " + "`c(current_time)'"

and you can optionally change date() to daily() in line with #2 (the two are synonyms)

[Emma Starr]

Thank you both for the help! That worked perfectly Hemanshu.