Removing hours, minutes and seconds from numeric date

[May Blake]

I have several variables that are a mixture of dates and times. I do not need the times and would just like to remove them. For example, a date such as 03oct2019 16:20:00 would just need to be shortened to 03oct2019 in order to be consistent with other dates. I have tried the code below but it's not giving me what I want. When I tried to convert the date back to a string in order to use the "DMY#", I get an error that says cannot be reversibly converted.



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* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str7 id double(first_date_of_recruitment last_date_of_recruitment)
"1"  1.8857388e+12             .
"2"  1888391520000             .
"3"  1.8883725e+12 1.8909549e+12
"5"  1891002480000             .
"7"  1.8884376e+12             .
"11" 1891023360000             .
"13"             .             .
"19" 1890964620000             .
"30"             .             .
"32"             . 1883241780000
end
format %tcDD-NN-YY first_date_of_recruitment
format %tcDD-NN-YY last_date_of_recruitment

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foreach var of varlist first_date_of_recruitment last_date_of_recruitment{
    
generate double `var'2 = clock(`var', "YDM hms")
format `var'2 %tcDD-NN-YY

}

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[Nick Cox]

The function dofc() pulls a daily date out of a datetime.

See

help datetime

and consider this token example

.

 di %tc  clock("2024 August 6 22:00", "YMD hm")
06aug2024 22:00:00

. di %td dofc(clock("2024 August 6 22:00", "YMD hm"))
06aug2024

[May Blake]

Thank you Nick, this worked perfectly!