Re: [Gretl-users] cannot import unbalanced panel data

On Fri, 13 Jun 2014, Allin Cottrell wrote: As I said, the data file in question was a panel with a half-hourly time dimension, and although it did not contain an index for the half-hours it did contain two string-valued series that held the key to forming such an index, namely DATE: "DD-MM-YYYY" and TIME: "hh:mm" In my previous posting I showed how a time index could be constructed, but admittedly in a somewhat clunky way which involved writing out series as text and reading them back in as strings. In current CVS and snapshots it's considerably easier. The thing is that string-valued series are relative newcomers in gretl and our treatment of them is not fully worked out. But here's an improvement: when you use an expression of the form seriesname[observation] in a hansl script what you get back now depends, as it should, on whether the series is string-valued or not. If not, you get a numerical value; if so, a string value. So an index of half hourly periods can now be created (with no file I/O) as follows. <hansl> scalar yr, mon, day, hr, min series ed, hm, halfhr loop i=1..$nobs -q sscanf(DATE[i], "%d-%d-%d", day, mon, yr) ed[i] = epochday(yr, mon, day) sscanf(TIME[i], "%d:%d", hr, min) hm[i] = hr*60 + min endloop ed = 1 + ed - min(ed) halfhr = 24*60*ed + hm halfhr = 1 + (halfhr - min(halfhr))/30 </hansl> Allin