st: RE: Replacing duplicate values

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

It's a Stata two-step: reshape, drop duplicates, reshape back. Something like 

* warning: untested code 
reshape long ipc_, i(id)
bysort id ipc_: gen superfluousandredundant = _n > 1 
drop if superfluousandredundant 
bysort id (ipc) : gen j = _n
reshape wide ipc, i(id) j(j) 

Actually, the last -reshape- might not be a good idea. The long structure might be more useful. 

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

Pavlos C. Symeou

I have a dataset which concerns patents. Every patent is assigned a 
number of International Patent Classifications (IPCs). However, there 
are mistakes in the database and certain IPCs appear more than once for 
a single patent, which is meaningless. Examples are patents with id 6 
and id 7 (ipc_1, ipc_2 etc list the number of IPCs a single patent is 
assigned). For the patent with id 6 we can see that ipc_2 and ipc_3 are 
the same.  Id 7 illustrates a more general issue. Duplicate values may 
not appear sequentially and may appear more than twice.

id    ipc_1    ipc_2    ipc_3    ipc_4
1     A44B    G09F    H04N
2     A47B    G06F    H05K    E05D
3     A47B    G06F
4     A47B    H04N    H05K
5     A47B
6     A47B    F16M    F16M    H05K
7     A47B    A47B F16M A47B

Can you suggest a way to delete the duplicate values, which can be more 
than two, and move the remaining to the left? For example patents with 
id 6 and id 7 would look like this:

id    ipc_1    ipc_2    ipc_3    ipc_4
6     A47B    F16M    H05K
7     A47B    F16M


*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/