Hi Statalisters,
I have a question about how to sort by a string variable in a
particular way. Suppose the data looks like:
animals ID
dog 5
cat 10
mouse 4
Suppose I want to sort by -animals- such that the first observation is
cat, the 2nd is mouse, the 3rd dog. Is there a command that may look
something like:
sort animals [some command] cat mouse dog ?
I have used some roundabout ways to deal with this, specifically
(suppose ID has unique observations) I generated another variable by
which I sorted by, i.e.
recode ID 10=1 4=2 5=3, gen(sortvar)
sort sortvar
but this is not a great solution given that I have some 800
observations and it is also not generalisable in the sense that if the
data gets modified so that the assigned ID for each animal changes, I
have to rewrite the -recode- command. I also considered transposing the
data then ordering the animal variables but I couldn't find a way to
make stata transpose and use as its new variables the observations of
-animals-
Any thoughts on this would really be appreciated!
Tewodaj
