Re: st: data management issue (names listed differently)

[Jeph Herrin <junk@spandrel.net>]

Rufus,

I faced the problem recently with hospital data; we only had hospital
names, and needed to identify the hospitals uniquely for the analysis.
I also had the same problem once before with drug info. Here's what I
did both times, translated to your situation (if your variable with
teamnames is -teamname-); it may work for you.

1. create a list of all the text names

   . u mydatafile, clear
   . bys teamname: keep if _n==1
   . outsheet teamname using teamnames.csv, replace

2. read this file teamnames.csv into Excel and add a
   second column -code-. in the second column, give the
   same number to every row that represents the same team.
   this is slightly time consuming, but if they are sorted
   on -teamname- it will just take a few minutes. one
   advantage here is you can always recheck your codings.

3. export this from excel as codes.csv; read it into Stata
   and sort on teamname

   . insheet codes.csv, clear
   . compress
   . sort teamname
   . save codes, replace

4. Now you have a file (codes.dta) which has a list of the team names
   in all their variety, and you can merge this into your original
   file to assign a common code to every team that is the same

   . u mydatafile, clear
   . sort teamname
   . merge teamname using codes

5. Now you can identify the teams by their codes; if you want you can
   assign a common name

   . bys code: replace teamname=teamname[_n-1] if _n>1


hope this helps,
Jeph


Rufus Peabody wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I'm working with a dataset that contains a few variable containing the 
> name of different college football teams.  The problem is, they are not 
> spelled consistently (i.e. Miami(FL) and Miami Florida; USC and Southern 
> Cal).  In many cases the spelling differs only in that there is an extra 
> space after the school name for some.  What I'd like to do (and I'm 
> pretty sure is possible) is create a master file with all the school 
> names and possible spellings, which I can then somehow merge with my 
> original dataset (and any future datasets with these teams) to create a 
> consistent spelling.  How do I go about doing this? Specifically, if I 
> have, say three variables containing spelling 1, spelling 2, and 
> spelling 3 of a school, and I want to use spelling 1 in another dataset, 
> how can I merge with a variable that has some schools with spellling 1 
> and others with spelling 2 or 3?
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Rufus
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