st: RE: Appending several files

["Newson, Roger B" <r.newson@imperial.ac.uk>]

You might use thwe -dsconcat- package, downloadable from SSC using the
-ssc- command. After installing, you can type

clear
cd "C:\data"
qui fs *
dsconcat `r(files)'

and this should do the same job as your code. -dsconcat- also has a
-subset- option if you want to concatenate only subsets of the variables
and/or observations from each file.

I hope this helps.

Roger


Roger Newson
Lecturer in Medical Statistics
Respiratory Epidemiology and Public Health Group
National Heart and Lung Institute
Imperial College London
Royal Brompton campus
Room 33, Emmanuel Kaye Building
1B Manresa Road
London SW3 6LR
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: +44 (0)20 7352 8121 ext 3381
Fax: +44 (0)20 7351 8322
Email: r.newson@imperial.ac.uk 
www.imperial.ac.uk/nhli/r.newson/

Opinions expressed are those of the author, not of the institution.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nuno Soares
Sent: 14 October 2006 12:43
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: Appending several files

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to make Stata to append several files that are in a given
directory without the need of specifying the name of each one. I was
thinking of doing something like this (using the fs package):

clear
cd "C:\data"
qui fs *
foreach f in `r(files)' {
append using `f'
}

The problem with this code is that Stata doesn't allow to append a data
file
when it doesn't have a file opened (it will return the error message:
"no dataset in use
r(3)")

This means that I must have at least one of the files loaded in Stata
before
using the above code. But if I then use the above code, I would end up
getting duplicate observations, because the file I've first used is also
appended... Any ideas of how to solve this issue?

Best,

Nuno



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