Re: st: RE: Question for Statalist about "Creating a macro for files"

[Ronnie Babigumira <rb.glists@gmail.com>]

Had not seen this when I sent my -forval- solution. I agree with Nick. One small comment, if you decide to continue with 
the loop, having all .dta files with the same "prefix" eg data1, data2 would make it easy for you to relate them to the 
bras in excel as they would be a 1 to 1 match in name (data1 = bra1)



Nick Cox wrote:

> -outsheet- will only support output using one file, 
> so your -outsheet- command is illegal. 
> I count three .dta files here, and three .xls files. 
> I guess that you want the equivalent of 
> use oilgs, clear 
> outsheet using bra1.xls
> use data2, clear 
> outsheet using bra2.xls
> use data3, clear 
> outsheet using bra3.xls
>
> Using -foreach- is not going to help you much here. 
> There is too much irregular detail that is not 
> reducible. 
> You could do this. 
> local i = 1 
> foreach file in oilgs data2 data3 { 
> 	use `file', clear 
> 	outsheet using bra`i'.xls 
> 	local ++i 
> } 
> but that replaces 6 lines with 6. 
> I could reduce the code to 5 lines, but 
> at the cost of some simplicity. 
> As said, the loop is not much simpler than 
> the code without a loop.
>
> If you do have an example with 5 files, 
> the loop is going to help you a bit more. 
> Nick 
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 
>  
> > I am trying to use the foreach command to "outsheet" five statafiles
> > into 5 excel files but don't know how to create the two lists. 
> > So far I have this...
> >
> > #delimit; 
> > foreach file in oilgs.dta  data2.dta data3.dta {;
> > outsheet using bra1.xls bra2.xls bra3.xls , replace;
> > };
> >  
> > But it doesn't recognize the list of  xls files 
>  
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