st: Looping with label define

["Eric A. Booth" <ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu>]

Hello:

I am trying to define labels for a numeric variable (countynumber)  
using an existing string variable (county) so that the the  
countynumber will take on a value label equal to the county for that  
same row.

I would like to use looping with the "label define" command to  
complete this task.
(I've been successful with using looping with the encode and replace  
commands to get this to work (after sorting the data), but my dataset  
has many variables (sorted in several different ways) that will get  
the same set of value labels & minor tweaks to the these value labels  
may occur frequently and so I'd like to be able to make those changes  
to one column and then apply it to all the associated variables in my  
dataset)

An example of what I've tried is below.  When I run this code, it  
applies  "Andrews" as the value label for all of the values in  
countynumber.

___________________________

clear
input str20 county countynumber
Andrews 1
Anderson 2
Austin	3
Bexar	5	
Childress	4
Denton	6
end

local testmacro = county[_n]

forvalues num = 1/6 {
	label define lab `num' "`testmacro'", modify
}

label val countynumber lab

___________________________

Thanks for any help!


Eric

__
Eric A. Booth
Public Policy Research Institute
Texas A&M University
ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu
Office: +979.845.6754
Fax: +979.845.0249
http://ppri.tamu.edu


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