Have you tried "destring" before egen?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Wade" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: st: Re: Unique Identifier
> --- Janet Oliver <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I have a dataset that consists of a name (of various
> > lengths), a treatment
> > and a time period (0..5) with not all patients being
> > seen at the six times,
> > and various clinical results. I wanted to create a
> > unique numerical
> > identifier based on name|treatment|time. I initally
> > concatenated the
> > variables "egen tid=concat(patient treat time)" and
> > the tried to destring
> > tid but this failed with the error message "tid
> > contains non-numeric
> > characters; no generate". I have examined the
> > variables in the editor and
> > cannot see any non-numeric characters.
> > My questions are 1) Is there any way of determining
> > non-numeric characters
> > or 2) Is there an efficient method of combing
> > name|treatment|time and
> > generating a unique ID (preferably starting at 1 and
> > increasing
> > sequentially) - or should I just type in the IDs by
> > hands.
> > Many thanks.
> > Janet
>
>
> Janet, if you haven't done it already you can use
> "describe" to confirm that the variables are numeric.
> Although they may look like numbers the may actually
> be stored as character, depending on how the data set
> was created. To convert a character to a numeric, you
> can use the "real" function, e.g., gen
> num=real(string)
>
> To help you identify unique observations, you may be
> able to use explicit subscripting, e.g. "_n", see the
> USer's Manual, or help for subscripting.
>
>
>
>
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