Stata: is there a way to count months between two dates, given in year-month format?-CodePudding

I am trying to simply count the months between two dates in Stata, given in year-month (%tm) format, data storage type being int. Basically, I want to do what the datediff(d1, d1, "month") function does in Stata 17 - except I have Stata 15. I saw a few other forums about this, but they all talked about solutions for a year-month-day format, which doesn't seem to work for me. Is there a way to do this?

CodePudding user response：

As both variables are numeric and the units are consistent, no special function is needed as a subtraction gives the answer.

. clear

. set obs 1
Number of observations (_N) was 0, now 1.

. gen now = ym(2022, 7)

. gen lastyear = ym(2021, 7)

. format now lastyear %tm

. di now - lastyear
12

. gen diff = now - lastyear

. l

      -------------------------- 
     |    now   lastyear   diff |
     |--------------------------|
  1. | 2022m7     2021m7     12 |
      --------------------------