The -findvar- command was part of a presentation I made at the Boston meeting. It is not useful to the general Stata community, as it was written to make use of specific variables and structures in our data banks.
However, the concept is simple. In a foreach loop we read in all of the data sets that comprise our data bank and extract the 1) variable name, 2) variable label and 3) path and file names. In turn, each iteration of the loop appends these identifiers (now as variables) to a file called -varfile- that is saved in specified directory.
With the file now saved, it can be searched by a text search program. Our program is called -findvar-. As I indicated, it is specific to our variables, but if anyone wants to see it and hack it, send me an email.
It searches variable names, labels, fragments of names and labels, and locations.
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Blanchette [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Fri 11/14/2003 9:19 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc:
Subject: st: findvar command?
I attended the Stata conference in Boston earlier this year
and I swear I heard someone mention that there was a command called
-findvar- that made finding variables in a dataset with many, many
variables easy. I found the -dsearch- command which does 90% of
what I want. I performed a -findit- search and didn't come up
with anything on -findvar-.
Any information regarding this would be helpful.
thanks,
dan
[email protected]
carolina population center, unc-ch
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
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