Here's the break-down:

I'm a grad student at LSU working with deer....

I caught a bunch of deer and put tracking devices on them. I've followed
them around for 1-2 years depending on the deer.

Thus, I have a data file for each deer that list all the dates in which I
located the animal:

Date1
Date2
Date3
.....Date228


In one of my analysis I am estimating the probability of an animal surviving
through the year or season.....
To do this, I am using Program MARK -

Program MARK uses 'encounter histories' to do this...

Thus....my data (from above) must be reformatted into an 'encounter history'
.......

with '10' meaning the animal was alive when i located it.

Thus, the above data set should then look like:

101010.......10

So, is there anyway that I can convert a list of dates (in the format
12312009) into one line of an 'encounter history'???
Can excel string together a '10' for every cell that was being used (had a
date in it)............?

Otherwise, I've got 48 deer with 200+ encounters each....... I'm looking at
manually entering ten-thousand '10''s.

Any ideas??

Any help would be much appreciated...

Thanks -

Justin