Re: st: re: household and person identifiers

[David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net>]

At 02:35 PM 3/10/2010, Kit wrote:
> <>
> Johanna wondered
>
> I am working with a dataset where two identifier numbers uniquely identify
> an individual. How do I create one identifier from the household and person
> identifiers in STATA?
>
>
> Martin suggested egen,group() but this would seem to be not very 
> handy, as the resulting ID will be an arbitrary integer. When I had 
> to do something like this with directorID (a number) and case code, I did
>
> g dircase = string(directorID)+string(casenr)
>
> That has the advantage of retaining both variables' contents in 
> readable form, and making it string avoids any overflow problems. 
> Naturally you could put in a separator such as +"_"+ in the 
> expression if you wish.

That separator may be necessary to insure uniqueness -- unless you 
are certain that the length of str(directorID) is constant (which you 
can insure with an appropriate format,
e.g. str(directorID, "%08.0f")).

HTH
--David

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