Michael Ewens

Suppose you have a string variable with a finite number of values (e.g. US states, industry, etc). The encode command plus the generate command will create a new variable that assigns unique ids to each string value:

encode your_string_variable, gen(new_string_as_int)

The labels in the edit/browse view will look like strings, so make sure you use ‘nolabel’ on any export or tab commands.

Here is some simple code to transform those pesky CRSP dates (YYYYMMDD) to Stata compatible dates:
insheet using "sp_daily.csv"
rename caldt date
* Date Transformation gen year = floor(date/10000)
gen month = floor((date - year*10000)/100)
gen day = floor(date - year*10000 - 100*month)
* replace the date
replace date = mdy(month, day, year)
format date %td