[Gretl-users] string to epoch

I was playing with the nice COVID international data set available at https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data The csv file contains a "date" column, that gretl reads as a string-valued series. In order to turn it into proper dates, I ended up writing this little function that turns a string valued series holding dates into a numeric string holding the epoch day. The requisite is that the string is organised as year-month-day, with an arbitrary delimiter that must be passed as the optional second parameter to the function (default: dash). <hansl> function series str2epoch(series s, string delimiter[null]) strings datestrs = strvals(s) scalar n = nelem(datestrs) fmt = "%d-%d-%d" if exists(delimiter) fmt = strsub(fmt, "-", delimiter) endif scalar y m d matrix ymd = seq(1,n)' ~ zeros(n, 3) loop i = 1 .. n s_i = datestrs[i] sscanf(s_i, fmt, y, m, d) ymd[i,2:] = {y,m,d} endloop series s_y = replace(s, ymd[,1], ymd[,2]) series s_m = replace(s, ymd[,1], ymd[,3]) series s_d = replace(s, ymd[,1], ymd[,4]) return epochday(s_y, s_m, s_d) end function </hansl> I'm posting it here in case it's useful to someone, but I'd also like to ask you people if you think this as valuable enough to be included in the extra package. ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti -------------------------------------------------------