Extracting a part of a string variable

[Eric Schroeder]

Dear all,

I have just started working with stata and I want to extract the year of a date variable which is saved as a string (e. g. "17.12.2019"). I do not know which command is needed and I am also not too familiar with the syntax of stata.

I am grateful for any assistance.

Kind regards,
Eric

[Nick Cox]

. di real(substr("17.12.2019", -4, 4))
2019

For a variable that would be something like

gen year = real(substr(trim(yourdate), -4, 4)

where the trim() would take care of any leading or trailing spaces.

See

help string functions 

help datetime

[Eric Schroeder]

Thanks a lot, Nick.