Extracting a date variable

[John MacDonald]

I have a date variable that is stored like this "06-FEB-2021 16:55". Any suggestions on how to use "clock" to extract this given the month is upper case "FEB" "JAN" etc. I wrote some code to do this but it isn't very efficient.

[John MacDonald]

Here is the clunky code I wrote:
gen day = substr(datetime,1,2)
destring day, replace
gen month = substr(datetime,4,3)
replace month="1" if month=="JAN"
replace month="2" if month=="FEB"
replace month="3" if month=="MAR"
replace month="4" if month=="APR"
replace month="5" if month=="MAY"
replace month="6" if month=="JUN"
replace month="7" if month=="JUL"
replace month="8" if month=="AUG"
replace month="9" if month=="SEP"
replace month="10" if month=="OCT"
replace month="11" if month=="NOV"
replace month="12" if month=="DEC"
destring month, replace
gen year = substr(datetime,8,4)
destring year, replace

[Andrew Musau]

display %td dofc(clock("06-FEB-2021 16:55", "DMYhm"))

Res.:

. display %td dofc(clock("06-FEB-2021 16:55", "DMYhm"))
06feb2021

See

help dofc()

[John MacDonald]

Thank you! This is much more efficient.

[Nick Cox]

Here is another way to do it.

di %td daily(word("06-FEB-2021 16:55", 1), "DMY")
06feb2021

with the implication

gen ddate = daily(word(yourvar, 1), "DMY")

The upper case months such as JAN are fine for Stata's date-time functions.