I can make sense of (part of) this only by correcting
the terminology.
By "variable names" I think you mean "text or string
values".
Also, your code (with an implicit first line)
set obs 100
egen var = seq(), f(1) t(5)
replace var = "a" if var==1
replace var = "b" if var==2
just wouldn't work. -var- is born numeric and cannot
be assigned string values without intervening major
surgery to change it from numeric to string.
This would work:
set obs 100
egen var = seq(), f(1) t(5)
tostring var, replace
tokenize "a b c d e"
forval i = 1/5 {
replace var = "``i''" if var == "`i'"
}
The examples
. di word("`c(alpha)'", 13)
m
. di substr("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", 13,1)
m
show that particular letters of the alphabet
can be selected in other ways, so that a
mapping from numbers to letters of the alphabet
could be achieved in other ways, for example by
forval i = 1/26 {
replace var = word("`c(alpha)'", `i') if var == "`i'"
}
or
local alpha "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
forval i = 1/26 {
replace var = substr("`alpha'", `i', 1) if var == "`i'"
}
I am afraid that I can't follow the rest of your posting,
especially what the 64 variables (values?) are that you wish to work
with. In particular, I can't comment on a -foreach- loop
that you don't show us.
The package -egenmore- on SSC includes an -egen- function -repeat()-
that is an analogue of -egen-'s -seq()- function: it can produce
string variables with values like "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "a",
... directly.
Nick
[email protected]
Kyle C. Longest
> 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,
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