In addition, see
How do I create individual identifiers numbered from 1 upwards?
<http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/group.html>
for an expansion of the ideas behind Phil's approach. Note that
. search IDs
or
. search identifiers
would have thrown up this FAQ.
Nick
[email protected]
Phil Schumm
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
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