You have a typo in your alphabet: "u" appears twice, and "i" not at all.
Just use /, not \, as Stata will explain to Windows. This is documented.
Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
Neil Shephard replied to A. Manzoni
> Is it possible to use the foreach function for part of the name of a
file or part of a variable name?
> I would like to write something similar to what below (in which there is
> something wrong, but I do not know if it is only a matter of quotes
or so or
> it is not possible to do what I want to do), where the x indicates
the wave
> so that the file has the same name just differing in the wave they were
> collected, as well as the variable sin the files, they are the same
but they
> are preceeded by a letter indicating the wave.
>
Try the following...
foreach x in a b c d e f g h u j k l m n o p q r s t u {
use "D:\Project\Data_anal\GSOEP\CD1984-2004\`x'kind.dta"
sort persnr
save "D:\Project\Data_anal\GSOEP\CD1984-2004\`x'kind.dta", replace
use "D:\Project\Data_anal\GSOEP\My analyses\temp\`x'p_mar.dta"
sort persnr
merge using "D:\Project\Data_anal\GSOEP\CD1984-2004\`x'kind.dta"
keep persnr `x'kzahl `x'hhgr
save "D:\Project\Data_anal\GSOEP\My analyses\temp\`x'p_mar_new.dta",
replace
}
This is untested as I don't have your data/directory structure, but
the potential problems I could see were
1. You don't need to need to put double quotes around the local macro x
2. The keep statement was on the same line as the merge (although this
could have been due to email gremlins)
3. There would not have been any _merge variable to drop if you had
only kept the two variables in the previous line
