Oh... Thank you! I am new to the -sort- option actually; guess there's
a catch to its convenience. :)
Mingfeng
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:03 AM, Michael Blasnik
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
>
> Your first statement is incorrect -- merge does not require a unique key
> unless you tell it that's what you expect/want/require.
> Just omit the -sort- option to your merge command and it will work. The
> help for -merge- notes that -sort- implies that the key is unique in both
> datasets.
>
> M Blasnik
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mingfeng Lin" <[email protected]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 10:51 PM
> Subject: st: merging without repeat obs in master dataset
>
>
>> Greetings!
>>
>> The -merge- command in Stata requires that the variable to merge
>> uniquely identify observations in the master dataset. But how should
>> I merge if the variable I would like to merge on does not uniquely
>> identify master dataset observations?
>>
>> For instance:
>> Master: ID GROUP
>> (multiple IDs could be in the same group)
>>
>> Using dataset: GROUP GROUPDEMOGRAPHICS
>>
>> I wanted to do
>> .merge GROUP using ..., sort
>>
>> error message r(459): something that should be true of your data is not;
>>
>> My final dataset should have each ID as an observation. Is there
>> something I can do to work around this?
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> Mingfeng
>
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