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

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

>

On Mar 4, 2010, at 3:52 PM, Nick Cox wrote:

> -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 


Thanks Nick.  
Now that Stata has moved -ds- back to "documented" status, maybe they will add that functionality to -ds- ...


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




> 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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