Thomas Erdmann--
You should merge on id7temp, not id7, since when you -encode-, the
string id7temp is converted to numeric values, and the order of
assignment may differ across your two datasets (try -la li- to see the
assignment in each dataset). If you want to use a numeric id, you can
generate one using a one-to-one mapping, using -gen- and a loop over
all possible characters, but it is more straightforward to merge on
the string var.
On 11/23/06, Thomas Erdmann <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I have a dataset with ids that look like: AT18679U (two strings followed by
5 numbers, optionally followed by another string)
Between the two datasets I would like to merge only the first 7 digits are
equal, therefore I generated
generate id7temp=substr(id,1,7)
encode id7temp, gen(id7)
sort id7
and merged the two datasets by id7. When I quality checked the results there
were several mismatches, which don't seem to happen if I use the string id
and not the encoded one. Why is that?
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