I'm not sure what there is to chew on.
The example shows that the program works,
although it lacks a help file. it should
also display an error message if no
sorting tokens are given.
The syntax is
mystringsort <strvar> <token1> [<token2> [<token3 ... ]]
so that -mystringsort- so that occurrences of
<token1> come first, and so forth.
Nick
[email protected]
TEWODAJ MOGUES
> Hi Joseph and Nick,
> Thanks to both of you for your ideas as to how to sort by a strin
> variable. Joseph, your idea is a neat trick to get around the lack of
> a transposing command that names the new variables according the
> values of an old variable. Nick, I'm still chewing on your
> programming
> suggestion, I think this will be helpful beyond my specific sorting
> problem.
> Thanks,
> Tewodaj
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:18:53 -0000
> From: "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
> Subject: st: RE: Re: sorting a string variable, but not alphabetically
>
> But you can do this, even though Michael's main point
> remains spot on. You just need to use a mechanism for
> interpreting your input as labels in a particular order
> defining a sorting variable.
>
> . l
>
> +-----------+
> | var1 |
> |-----------|
> 1. | two names |
> 2. | bird |
> 3. | cat |
> 4. | dog |
> 5. | mouse |
> +-----------+
>
> . mystringsort var1 cat dog
>
> . l
>
> +-----------+
> | var1 |
> |-----------|
> 1. | cat |
> 2. | dog |
> 3. | bird |
> 4. | two names |
> 5. | mouse |
> +-----------+
>
> . mystringsort var1 "two names"
>
> Here is a sketch:
>
> program mystringsort
> version 8
> gettoken varname 0 : 0
> capture confirm string var `varname'
> if _rc {
> di as err "`varname' should be a string variable"
> exit 198
> }
>
> tempvar encoded
> tempname lblname
> local i = 1
>
> foreach w of local 0 {
> label def `lblname' `i++' `"`w'"', modify
> }
>
> encode `varname', gen(`encoded') label(`lblname')
> sort `encoded'
> end
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