xtset with a string variable for quarterly time

[Danielle leblanc]

Hi,
gvkey is the id of the firm and i downloaded a column datafqtr from the database that has the following format 2002q1,2002q2 etc... where the first 4 digits are for the year and q1,q2 etc... represents the quarter

 xtset gvkey datafqtr, quarterly

is giving me the following error
string variables not allowed in varlist;
datafqtr is a string variable
r(109);
How can i set datafqtr as the time variable in my regressions?

[Andrew Musau]

You need a numerical time variable.

gen quarter= quarterly(datafqtr, "yq")
format quarter %tq
xtset gvkey quarter

All discussed in

help datetime