Eric Wruck, Rafal Raciborski and Joseph Coveney made
overlapping suggestions that all solved the problem,
so there's almost nothing left to be said, but I'll
say it anyway.
For the general problem, the main ideas that make
things easier are
* looping over variables with -foreach-
* using -substr()- or -index()- to look for substrings.
My main comment is to emphasise a point tacit in most
answers: you can exploit Stata's treatment of true and
false directly in such problems, and not just indirectly.
For example,
gen OK = 0
qui foreach v of var icd* {
replace OK = OK + index(`v', "E11")
}
keep if OK
works because any non-zero sum in -OK-
is treated as true. Similarly, with
the innermost statement instead
replace OK = OK + (substr(`v',1,3) == "E11")
the parenthesised expression evaluates
to 0 or 1, and so the same trick will
work: the criterion is whether the sum is
non-zero (here, positive) or not.
The "or" operator | naturally leads to
the same conclusion.
It is largely a matter of taste whether
you do it this way or using lots of -if-
conditions. The -if- route perhaps is
closer to the way people actually
think about the question, but doing
it this way has a habit of growing on you.
There is background at
What is true and false in Stata?
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/trueorfalse.html
King, Belinda L
> > I am wanting to create a variable that tells me whether the
> patient has an
> > ICD10 starting with E11. I am not interested in the numbers
> after the dots,
> > nor am I interested in any of the other ICD10 codes and I
> am wanting to drop
> > patients who do not have E11 in one of the ICD10 columns. I
> have tried
> > playing with foreach, but this side of things is new for me
> and I just keep
> > getting messages telling me the syntax is incorrect. I would greatly
> > appreciate any hints someone could give me, thank you in advance.
> >
> > +----------------------------------+
> > | id icd10_1 icd10_2 icd10_3 |
> > |----------------------------------|
> > 1. | 1 K61.3 Z86.43 F05.9 |
> > 2. | 2 B95.8 Z06.2 Z86.43 |
> > 3. | 3 E11.69 R40.2 E11.9 |
> > 4. | 4 Z86.43 Z95.8 E87.6 |
> > 5. | 5 K59.0 K59.0 Z93.1 |
> > |----------------------------------|
> > 6. | 6 E11.65 E11.66 R63.4 |
> > 7. | 7 E11.22 E66.9 E11.23 |
> > 8. | 8 E11.9 E78.0 K63.50 |
> > 9. | 9 E78.0 E11.65 D50.9 |
> > 10. | 10 E11.65 K59.0 Z93.0 |
> > +----------------------------------+
> >
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