For want of a better, term, I describe my question as how to loop inside a
single command. I don't see how to make foreach or forvalues work for
this kind of problem, nor has browsing the programming manual, the FAQs, or
Nick Cox's Stata Journal articles on lists turned up a solution.
The command uses the arguments x1...xN, and I would like to be able to
treat N as a variable. For instance, I need to read a fixed-format text
file which contains a number N of string variables; N varies each time I
run the program. The following infix statement does the job for N=5:
infix ///
str name 124-143 ///
str id 144-152 ///
str a1 217 str a2 218 str a3 219 str a4 220 str a5 221 ///
using rawdata.txt
The data are further massaged by some statements of the form
gener str b*=function(a*)
gen str5 answer1= b1+b2+b3+b4+b5
However, N varies from say 25 to 100 (the variables are answers on a
multiple choice test), so I would prefer to use some kind of structure
which allows me to set N once, and then build up each command without
typing the full list of arguments x1...xN.
Thanks for any insight you can provide.
Devra
______________________________________________________________
Devra L. Golbe, Professor
Dept. of Economics
Hunter College / CUNY
695 Park Ave., NY, NY 10021
voice: 212-772-5408
fax: 212-772-5398 (office)
208-361-5964 (e-fax)
