Re: st: sort won't sort

[Nick Winter <nw53@cornell.edu>]

A wild guess, but are there leading spaces in the year variable for some of 
your cases?

Consider (and note the leading space in the replace statement):
------------------------------------------------------
. set obs 2
obs was 0, now 2

. gen str year="1900" in 1
(1 missing value generated)

. replace year=" 1901" in 2
year was str4 now str5
(1 real change made)

. sort year

. list

     +-------+
     |  year |
     |-------|
  1. |  1901 |
  2. |  1900 |
     +-------+

.
----------------------------------------------------


At 02:54 PM 12/8/2004 -0800, you wrote:

> Hello,
> I am sorting a dataset on variable "year", (str5   %9s).
> When I list on year, some are out of order.
> I've tried re-sorting, or creating a new variable with the same text, but 
> no luck.
>
> . sort year
> . list id year  if exc==0
>      +-------------+
>      |  id    year |
>      |-------------|
>   9. |  43    1997 |
>  10. |  43    1997 |
>  79. | 237    2004 |
>  80. | 237    2004 |
>  81. |  35    1998 |
>  82. | 191    1998 |
>      |-------------|
>  83. |  22    2000 |
>  84. | 277    2004 |
>      +-------------+
>
> .
>
>
> *
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--------------------------------------------------------
Nicholas Winter                           607.255.8819 t
Assistant Professor                       607.255.4530 f
Department of Government              nw53@cornell.edu e
308 White Hall            falcon.arts.cornell.edu/nw53 w
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-4601 

*
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