Change Date to Numeric Issue

[Jay Feng]

Hi all,

I'm trying to change the values of my string date variable to numeric date variable. Currently the format is like this:

12/03/23
12/01/23
11/30/23
11/28/23

I tried to use numdate to convert the values after removing the "/" using subinstr but (I think?) since the year value is 23 and not 2023, the numdate command isn't working.

Is there a way to convert the dates to numerics using numdate whilst only having the "23" for year or how can I add "20" in front of the "23"s for all values and use numdate after that?

[Nick Cox]

numdate from SSC will work perfectly well so long as you tell it about the century. In this respect it's no different from Stata's date-time funcions. Examples are included in the help.

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str8 date
"12/03/23"
"12/01/23"
"11/30/23"
"11/28/23"
end

numdate daily wanted = date, pattern(MD20Y)

list 

     +----------------------+
     |     date      wanted |
     |----------------------|
  1. | 12/03/23   03dec2023 |
  2. | 12/01/23   01dec2023 |
  3. | 11/30/23   30nov2023 |
  4. | 11/28/23   28nov2023 |
     +----------------------+

[Jay Feng]

Thank you! Worked perfectly