Much better than my idea
Tony
Peter A. Lachenbruch
Department of Public Health
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97330
Phone: 541-737-3832
FAX: 541-737-4001
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Phil Schumm
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 3:25 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: Individual IDs with non-numeric characters
On Feb 2, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Benson Limann wrote:
> The individual IDs in my dataset are in the string format. I
> currently use -destring- to make them numeric. But, unfortunately,
> some individual IDs have non-numeric characters. As a result, -
> destring- with the -force- option deletes all these individuals
> automatically.
>
> Given that I want to sort all the observations, is it possible to
> keep these individuals with non-numeric IDs?
It's unclear what you're asking -- if some IDs have non-numeric
characters that you want to preserve, then you have no choice but to
leave the variable as a string. Why would you want to destring your
ID variable anyway, given the headaches that a long numeric ID can
cause (if not handled properly)? If the only reason is to facilitate
the use of commands that require a numeric identifier (e.g., -xtset-),
then this is easily addressed, e.g.:
egen panel = group(id)
xtset panel
-- Phil
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