RE: st: RE: How to get a list of the names of characters associated with a variable

["Nick Cox" <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

-ds- looks only for names of characteristics. It does not look inside,
at their contents. That is arguably an omission. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Eric Booth

When I saw Austin's solution for searching the char of the variables, my
first thought was that -ds- should be able to do that--but I couldn't
get it to work with -ds-.  I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here :

**
sysuse auto, clear
note mpg: inverse of good measure

ds, has(char *meas*)
	di "`r(varlist)'"
ds, has(char *m*)
	di "`r(varlist)'"
ds, has(note "inverse of good measure")
	di "`r(varlist)'"

**

Also, Austin's note on using index() is an important warning for the
example I posted as well.

On Mar 4, 2010, at 3:20 PM, Austin Nichols wrote:

> Clyde Schechter:
> Try this example:
> 
> prog lookfc
> version 8.2
> syntax [varlist], t(string)
> foreach v of varlist `varlist' {
> loc c: char `v'[]
> loc nall 0
> foreach i of local c {
>  loc j: char `v'[`i']
>  loc k: subinstr loc j `"`t'"' "", all count(loc n)
>  loc nall=`nall'+`n'
>  }
> if `nall' > 0 {
>  loc var `var' `v'
>  }
> }
> if "`var'"!="" ds `var'
> end
> sysuse auto, clear
> note mpg: inverse of good measure
> lookfc, t(meas)
> 
> One problem with using index() or strpos() is that they will truncate
> strings; according to -help limits-, the maximum length of the
> contents of a characteristic is 8,681 characters for Small Stata and
> 67,784 characters for Stata/IC, Stata/SE, and Stata/MP.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Perhaps you mean characteristics. See -help extended_fcn-.
>> 
>> Nick
>> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>> 
>> Clyde Schechter MA, MD
>> 
>> I'm trying to write an ado file that will generalize the -lookfor-
>> command
>> so that it also searches for the target text in characters associated
>> with
>> variables.  (I need this because I have a data set with a large
number
>> of
>> variables, and the key information is often found not in the label
>> [which
>> was truncated at 80 characters], but in a character--and the
characters
>> are not consistently named.)

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