How do I drop a variable a variable only if it has exactly the name I
specify, rather than any name that begins with the characters I specify? I
need an way to prevent automatic expansion of variable names. I'm trying to
avoid falling into the trap that some other programs fall into, such as
-rndbin- :
. clear
. set obs 10
obs was 0, now 10
. gen xbest=1
. summ
Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
-------------+-----------------------------------------------------
xbest | 10 1 0 1 1
. rndbin 10 0.2 100
( Generating .......... )
Variable xb created.
. summ
Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
-------------+-----------------------------------------------------
xb | 10 22 2.828427 16 25
What happened to xbest?? The answer is that -rndbin.ado- contains the line:
cap drop xb
Which drops any variable name beginning with xb, rather than just dropping a
variable called exactly xb if one exists.
I'm not criticizing the author of -rndbin- (which has generated countless
millions of random numbers for me in the last few weeks), as I actually fell
into this trap myself first and dropped a variable I didn't mean to from my
dataset, before wondered how other similar programs deal with the issue. I
happened to look at rndbin because I'm using it a lot at the moment and it's
a program that adds a variable to your dataset, as mine does. Obviously the
situation in the example above could be avoided by using first renaming xbest
to something not beginning with xb before called rndbin, but that's not the
issue. The user of a program shouldn't have to worry about what their
existing variables are called to avoid the possibility of losing data.
I'd be grateful for advice on what's considered best Stata programming
practice to avoid this pitfall,
Roger.
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