On this one, it will help if we can clarify a few points.

At 04:53 PM 6/9/2005, Kimberly Ashburn wrote:

>I am trying to write syntax to define a custom date set up in the >format dd/mm/yy.

It is easy to create a date variable that displays in that format: NUMERIC CUSTM_DT (ADATE8). Alternatively, NUMERIC CUSTM_DT (ADATE10). will display as mm/dd/yyyy (4-digit year).

Now: Will you have one date per record, or several? Are you reading these dates from an external file? Or are you writing syntax to write a record for each date over a time interval? Or, what else? That is: where do you get the dates themselves (not the variable they're recorded in), and what do they mean?

>I am trying to distinguish by day as people were recruited into the >study daily but the measures we are tracking were taken daily.

You've probably got a misprint here: one of those "daily"s should probably be "weekly".

>I don't understand how to set periodicity then for days that are >sometimes 30 a month and sometimes 31. We also have weekend dates >missing. Does anyone know what the syntax might look like? Any >suggestions are greatly appreciated.

If you are using SPSS date variables (as you should be), it's very easy to create a series, because they increment uniformly. Here's code to write a series of dates. But I'm not sure it's what you want, and I don't know what you want done about weekend dates. It's tested, though; SPSS draft output:

* Write all dates from 27 Jan 2005 to 3 March 2005: . NEW FILE. INPUT PROGRAM. NUMERIC CUSTM_DT (ADATE8). NUMERIC #START #END (ADATE8). COMPUTE #START=DATE.MDY(01,27,2005). COMPUTE #END =DATE.MDY(03,03,2005). . /**/ NUMERIC #INTVL (F5). . /**/ COMPUTE #INTVL = CTIME.DAYS(#END-#START). . /**/ PRINT / #START #END #INTVL ' days'. LOOP CUSTM_DT = #START TO #END BY TIME.DAYS(1). . /*-- PRINT /CUSTM_DT. . END CASE. END LOOP. END FILE. END INPUT PROGRAM. LIST.

List Notes |---------------------|--------------------| |Output Created |10 Jun 05 01:44:36 | |---------------------|--------------------|

01/27/05 03/03/05 35 days

CUSTM_DT

01/27/05 01/28/05 01/29/05 01/30/05 01/31/05 02/01/05 02/02/05 02/03/05 02/04/05 02/05/05 02/06/05 02/07/05 02/08/05 02/09/05 02/10/05 02/11/05 02/12/05 02/13/05 02/14/05 02/15/05 02/16/05 02/17/05 02/18/05 02/19/05 02/20/05 02/21/05 02/22/05 02/23/05 02/24/05 02/25/05 02/26/05 02/27/05 02/28/05 03/01/05 03/02/05 03/03/05

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