Jamie,
Thanks much! The key new thing for me was -type-, which I thought only
applies to whole datasets, not variables. This helped in sorting out
the string from the numeric variables, which allows me to collapse the
numeric part of the dataset. As to the string part, I am still
wondering how I can collapse the original dataset, once purged of the
numeric variables, according to some string criteria. I want to
collapse them to give the highest "value" by some variable, say by
location. That is, if I have:
location var1 var2
place1 a X
place1 b m
place1 c
place2 f 2
place2 F 5
place2 9 10
place3 k
place3
place3 p
after collapsing that should give:
location var1 var2
place1 c m
place2 f 2
place3 p
The purpose of this is to see for which locations there are no
observations (in this case, it is for place3 in the case of var1).
Thanks,
Tewodaj
