Entry Number, Date, and Panel Data Functions

RATS includes a perpetual calendar which is valid for dates from 1800 on. (Validity for historical data depends upon when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in a given area.) There are quite a few functions which allow you to make use of this. The first group of these analyze the date information for entries (E argument) in the current CALENDAR setting. A second group looks directly at year:month:day (Y,M,D arguments). Some of the functions take a day of the week as an argument, or return day of the week information. This is coded as 1=Monday to 7=Sunday.

The "Julian" functions are all based upon a day numbering scheme which starts at a theoretical extension of the Gregorian calendar back to Jan 1, 0001.

%allocend()	Default workspace length
%cal(year,period)	Entry number of specified date
%calendar()	Returns the current CALENDAR setting
%closestdate(y,m,d,dow)	Observance date for y:m:d (closest day of week)
%closestweekday(y,m,d)	Observance date for y:m:d (closest Monday–Friday)
%dateandtime()	Current date and time
%datelabel(t)	Date label for a given date/entry number
%day(t)	Day of month for entry T
%daycount(t)	Number of days in entry T
%dow(y,m,d)	Day of week for given date
%easter(y,m,d)	Dates after March 23rd for (Western) Easter
%floatingdate(y,m,dow,n)	Day of month for floating holiday
%indiv(t)	Individual within a panel set
%julian(t)	Number of (theoretical) days from Jan 1, 0001 to entry T in the current CALENDAR scheme.
%julianfromcoded(x,c)	Number of (theoretical) days from Jan 1, 0001 to the date coded as a real number like 19700530.
%julianfromymd(y,m,d)	Number of (theoretical) days from Jan 1, 0001 to the date described using separate year, month and day values.
%month(t)	Month number (1–12) of entry T
%panelobs()	Size of panel data time dimension
%panelsize()	Size of panel data individual dimension
%period(t)	Period within a panel set
%regend()	Ending entry of most recent regression
%regstart()	Starting entry of most recent regression
%today()	Today’s entry
%tradeday(t,d)	Number of occurrences of day D in period T
%weekday(t)	Day of week of entry T
%year(t)	Year number