In response to my posting about precision issues, Michael McCulloch
<[email protected]> asked, To: [email protected]
> May I ask, for those of us with lesser experience, what are the command
> methods to stick to in generating variables, so that the integer result we
> want isn't missed by Stata because of the binary storage?
The last sentence of my previous post pretty much said it:
The rule is, "Make extraction calculations using integers."
Jian Zhang <[email protected]> wanted to extract the 127 part from 21557127. My
solution was,
. gen leftpart = int(ID/1000)
. gen areaxxx = ID - leftpart*1000
although others have suggested
. gen area = mod(ID, 1000)
and that is a great solution. But going back to my solution, the point is
that even though I divided by 1000, I immediately truncated the result to an
integer. If, every step of the way, values are integers, you cannot go wrong.
-- Bill
[email protected]
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/