Re: st: Looping for dictionary file

[Joseph Coveney <jcoveney@bigplanet.com>]

Rijo John wrote [excerpted]:

I run the following loop and I am getting the solution. However, there
is a small problem. At present, as I have written it, the loop runs
from state 2 to 10 only. I need to run the sate1 extraction first.
Then save it as  country.dta and then use the following program to run
the remaining loop to create the final data. But is there someway I
can avoide the first step. If I run the loop from 1/10 without running
1 separately, it will give me the error saying  country.dta doesnt
exist while I try to append. Can someone help me to figure out a
better way to loop it?

forvalues i = 2/10{
   local raw_data "D:\Data\state`i'.txt"
   local dict "D:\Paper\country.dct"
   local outfile "D:\Paper\country.dta"

   infile using `dict' if level==2, using (`raw_data') clear

   sort fsu hamgroup sstratum hldno
  *save "D:\Paper\country.dta", replace
   append using "D:\Paper\country.dta"
   sort fsu hamgroup sstratum hldno
   save `outfile', replace
   clear
   }


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Try -save , emptyok- before the loop.

Also, pull your constant local macro variables outside of the loop; you
don't need to redefine them each pass through it.

And you don't need to -sort- in order to -append-, or to -clear- each pass
through the loop.  Double quotes are needed when you have spaces in the 
path.

Joseph Coveney

clear *
save `outfile', emptyok
local dict D:/Paper/country.dct
local outfile D:/Paper/country.dta
forvalues i = 1/10 {
   infile using `dict' if level==2, using(D:\Data\state`i'.txt) clear
   append using `outfile'
   save `outfile', replace
}
sort fsu hamgroup sstratum hldno
save `outfile', replace
exit


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