Your loop is a good idea, except
that putting the name in a new variable
is not the best way to do it.
And there is no point in doing this
for _all_ variables. Perhaps there
are some other problems too.
My official Stata solution:
foreach v of var *_ {
local V : subinstr local v "_" "", all
capture rename `v' `V'
if _rc di as txt "problem with `v'"
}
User-written program:
renvars *_, map(substr("@", 1, index("@","_") - 1))
(-renvars- was last updated in Stata Journal 5(4).)
Bail out now if this is transparent.
Otherwise:
*_ catches all variable names that end with an underscore.
-capture- traps any problem inside the loop and lets it continue.
-renvars- won't rename any variable unless all new variable names are
OK (legal and unambiguous).
The rule for a new name is
substr("@", 1, index("@","_") - 1)
namely, start at the beginning and stop just before the first underscore.
Nick
[email protected]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
> Thomas Speidel
> Sent: 25 January 2006 20:46
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: st: Renaming varnames
>
>
> I have a dataset whose variable names contain a varying amount of
> trailing underscores (_).
> Is there a way to rename all variable names without the trialing
> underscores (other than renaming each individual variable)?
>
> ILLNESS___ byte %10.0g
> SPECIMEN__ str12 %12s
> HOSPITAL__ byte %10.0g
> TYPE______ byte %10.0g
> STAGE_____ str4 %9s
> SIZE______ byte %10.0g
> ...
>
> This is what I have tried so far (unsuccessfully):
>
>
> foreach v of varlist _all {
> gen `v'_underscore=strpos("`v'", "_")
> rename `v' `=substr("`v'", 1, `v'_underscore)'
> }
>
*
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