Is there an elegant way to place the contents of a string variable into a macro?
The following code places the contents of variables into macros, but seems rather clumsy.
Placing the contents of a variable into a macro could be useful. For instance, suppose we have a first, small dataset in which one of the variables is a list of names which identify a subset of the variables in a second dataset. We might like to keep the second dataset open while performing an operation in turn on each of the variables listed in the first, small dataset.
/* Create a toy dataset */
clear all
input X str10 name str10 mixed
5 "dog" 1
2 "cat" "rat"
1 "mouse" 55
3 "cat" "eat"
end
list
local N= _N
local Xlist
local namelist
local mixedlist
forvalues thisrow=1 (1) `N' {
local thisX=X[`thisrow']
local thisname=name[`thisrow']
local thismixed=mixed[`thisrow']
local Xlist `Xlist' `thisX'
local namelist `namelist' `thisname'
local mixedlist `mixedlist' `thismixed'
}
di "`Xlist'"
di "`namelist'"
di "`mixedlist'"
foreach thisvar in `namelist' {
di "This variable is `thisvar'"
/* Do something with this variable */
}
exit
Surely there's a smarter way to define these macro lists?
Jacob A. Wegelin
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Virginia Commonwealth University
730 East Broad Street Room 3006
P. O. Box 980032
Richmond VA 23298-0032
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