Re: st: Create String Variable out of Variable Names

[Kyle Hood <kyle.hood@yale.edu>]

I'm a bit confused -- which observations do you want to have each variable 
assigned to, or do you just want a dataset with one observation for each 
variable name?  To get a column that contain all of the variables, you 
could do the following:

gen varname = ""
local i = 1
foreach var of varlist * {
replace varname = "`var'" in `i'
local i = `i' + 1
}
keep varname
drop if varname == "varname"
drop if varname = ""

Why do you need the number of observations for your new variable to be 
equal to the number of observations in your dataset?

Kyle


On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Kyle C Longest wrote:


> I have a set of variables that I would like to use to generate a singular 
> String variable. The number of cases in each resulting value is 
> inconsequential.
>
> So for example if I had 5 variables (a b c d e) in a data set with 100 
> observations I would like a String variable that looked something like:
>
> Var |  Frequency
> a              20
> b              20
> c              20
> d              20
> e              20
>
> Now I know that in this simple case I could do this line by line with:
>
> egen var = seq(), f(1) t(5)
> replace var = "a" if var==1
> replace var = "b" if var==2
> ...
>
> But in the case of 64 variables this is unrealistically tedious, especially 
> as I am hoping to incorporate this into a more encompassing program to be 
> used with different sets of variables.
>
> The problem I've run into with -foreach- is that it loops so that in the end 
> the resulting variable looks like (using the example from above).
>
> Var | Freq
> e      100
>
> [Also note that the variables are not mutually exclusive (ala dummies), so 
> that a case could ==1 on several of the variables]
>
> Any help with this would be greatly apprecaited,
> Thank you,
> Kyle C. Longest
> Phd Student - Dept of Sociology
> Univ. of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
> klongest@email.unc.edu
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