Re: st: Converting letters to numbers

[Philip Ryan <philip.ryan@adelaide.edu.au>]

I ran Joseph's code against Clive's data and it appeared to deliver what 
Clive wants (if I understand Clive correctly).

Clive, did you -list- the data resulting from Joseph's code with the 
-nolabel- option, to show the real, underlying form of the data ?

I have not seen Michael Blasnik's contribution to this thread on the list, 
so I cannot comment on details, but note that -subinstr() is a *function*, 
not a command, so Stata quite rightly objects if you type:

. subinstr(...)

apart form the incorrect specification of the argument that you supplied. 
(see help strfun)

Even if used correctly as a function  < gen newvar = subinstr(...) >   I 
think the complexity of the code would probably equal or exceed that of 
Joseph's suggestion, as you might need to use some nested -cond()- 
functions to sequentially look at the string (is it "c" or "d" or l" or "n" 
?) and make the appropriate substitution, and you will still need to loop 
through the party? variables.



Phil



At 12:42 AM 28/01/2004 +0000, you wrote:

> Joseph Coveney wrote:
>
> > How about something like this?
> >
> > label define Parties 1 c 2 d 3 l 4 n
> > forvalues i = 1/4 {
> >     encode party`i', generate(Party`i') label(Parties)
> >     drop party`i'
> >     rename Party`i' party`i'
> > }
>
> OK, it ran, but the end-result still displays letters rather than the
> numeric (and real) values I want them to represent.
>
> I should be a bit more specific in explaining what I've tried to overcome
> this difficulty (I'm on v8.2). I've used -encode-, as in
>
> . encode party1, gen(winner)
>
> but this merely produced variables with the same characters. Stata won't
> accept a simple -recode- such as
>
> . recode party c=1
>
> Michael Blasnik did suggest -subinstr-, but I couldn't work out how to
> action this command. Every time I tried it, including
>
> . subinstr(c,l,d,1,2,3)
>
> I kept getting an 'unrecognized command' error (oddly). There has to be a
> simple solution to this simple problem!
>
> CLIVE NICHOLAS        |t: 0(44)191 222 5969
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Philip Ryan
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Department of Public Health
Associate Dean (Information Technology)
Faculty of Health Sciences
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South Australia
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