I am working with the GSOEP (German Socioeconomic) panel survey. I have a series of files for each of seventeen waves of the data, which are labeled such that the file denoting the first year (wave) of data begins with the letter a, the file denoting the second year (wave) of data begins with the letter b, etc.. What I would like to do is to open each of the seventeen files, keep the person id variable, and another variable, then save these new files using the same filename as the original, with one small exception--renaming the files with the year name (1984,1985, etc.) at the end of the filename, dropping the wave-denoting letters (a,b, etc.) from the filename altogether. To make this easier, I have created a short forvalues loop:
local wave "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r"
local i=1985
while `i'<=2001 {
foreach x of local wave {
use "C:\Directory\`x'filename.dta", clear
keep personid `x'variable
save "C:\Directory\filename`i'.dta", replace
}
}
Once again, the successive year files begin with a letter matched to a particular year; afilename, bfilename, cfilename, etc., where a=1985, b=1986...r=2001.
The short program above should open the file afilename.dta, keep the required variables, and save the new file as filename1985.dta, and so on.
The problem is that Windows doesn't seem to recognize the `x' after the \ symbol (in the third line of the program above). Is there a way to get around this? I assume that Windows is disturbed by the placement of the symbols \` beside each other.
Stata gives me the following error message:
file C:`x'filename.dta not found
Thanks in advance,
Josip
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