Dear Eva,
Thank you. For the record (in case anyone else is as in need of this information as I am), here is a way to do it.
capture program drop myTRY
program define myTRY
capture confirm variable `1'
if _rc==0 {
di "`1' already exists, so ..."
}
else {
di "`1' does not exist yet, so maybe we want to first generate it ..."
}
end
myTRY "dogAndCAT"
myTRY dogAndCat
myTRY Age
Jake
Re: st: to check if a variable already exists
From "Eva Poen" <[email protected]>
To [email protected]
Subject Re: st: to check if a variable already exists
Date Mon, 6 Oct 2008 23:26:10 +0100
It's -help confirm-, again.
If you do programming, NC151 will be useful (see a recent announcement
on this list).
Eva
2008/10/6 Jacob Wegelin <[email protected]>:
Is there a way to check whether a variable is already defined, already
exists? I'd like to write code of the following sort:
if (variable called performance is not yet defined) {
gen performance=.
}
replace performance=5 if name=George
Thanks for any ideas
Jake
Jacob A. Wegelin
[email protected] Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Virginia Commonwealth University
730 East Broad Street Room 3006
P. O. Box 980032
Richmond VA 23298-0032
U.S.A. http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin
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