As Phil Schumm half-stated earlier, I am the author of -sxpose-, which
is on SSC. (There are other Nicks, old and young.)
There is only version of -sxpose-, 1.0.0.
The help warns
-firstnames- specifies that the first variable (first column) in the
existing dataset is to be treated as a set of variable names for the
variables in the transposed dataset. This first column will not appear
as the first observation in the new dataset. Any values that are not
legal variable names will be lost.
Ideally, Rich can just get rid of his hyphens by
replace field = subinstr(field, "-", "", .)
Another thing to look out for that the values of -field- are all
distinct. There are several ways to check that. There is a survey in
SJ-8-4 dm0042 . . . . . . . . . . . . Speaking Stata: Distinct
observations
(help distinct if installed) . . . . . . N. J. Cox and G. M.
Longton
Q4/08 SJ 8(4):557--568
shows how to answer questions about distinct observations
from first principles; provides a convenience command
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Goldstein
data error -- it turns out that some of the strings in "field" contained
hypthens -- since varnames cannot contain hyphens, sxpose would not do
the rename -- but gave me no error message -- sorry for the confusion
From: Richard Goldstein <[email protected]>
not on my machine -- I even downloaded a new copy of sxpose (from ssc)
and did exactly what you suggested (via cut-and-paste) and the new
varnames are _var# (258 of them)
so ...
Phil Schumm wrote:
> On May 18, 2009, at 8:19 PM, Richard Goldstein wrote:
>> nope -- Nick's -sxpose- gives me variables with varnames _var1, etc
--
>> which is of no use; sorry for not mentioning that I had already tried
it
>
>
> That's what the -firstnames- option does. Without it, you'll get
> variables named _var1, _var2, etc. With -firstnames-, you'll get
> variables named namea, nameb, etc.
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