Re: st: Problem with foreach loops

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 03:36 PM 6/7/2004 +1000, you wrote:
> Dear statalist,
>
>   Can anyone spot the mistake with the following snippet of code.
>
>   It actually works fine, and recodes and labels the variable
>   in the way I wish, but in exiting (?) the loops it runs into problems.
>
>   Any advice would be most appreciated.
I believe what is happening is that ajbmspay gets recoded 6 times, creating 
new variables a_pay, a_security, etc.  These 6 vars all have identical 
values.  The outer loop then moves on to ajbmswrk, and tries to recode it 
into a_pay.  Because a_pay already exists, you get an error message.  In 
short, the new vars may have the labels you want, but they don't have the 
values; all 6 are just recodes of ajbmspay.

In SPSS, I would do this with DO REPEAT commands.  My Stata programming 
isn't as strong, but since I may be one of the few members of the list who 
happens to be awake right now I'll offer some possible workarounds:

foreach x in pay sec wrk hrs flx all {
   recode ajbms`x'(-4 -3 -1=.), gen(a_`x')
   la var a_`x' "Satisfaction with `x'"
}

I think this does the recodes right, but doesn't give you the var names or 
exact labels that you wanted.  Better programmers than I can probably tell 
you a better solution.  On the other hand, it is only 6 variables, so 
unless you need to do this sort of thing routinely it may be easier just to 
use brute force to write the handful of lines required to do this without 
looping.

Or,

recode  ajbmspay ajbmssec ajbmswrk ajbmshrs ajbmsflx ajbmsall(-4 -3 -1=.), 
gen(a_pay a_security a_work a_hours a_flexibility a_overall)
foreach y in pay security work hours flexibility overall{
la var a_`y' "Satisfaction with `y'"
}


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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