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From | "Nick Cox" <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> |
To | <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: RE: RE: Changing variable name to variable label |
Date | Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:35:30 +0100 |
That "seem to be constant" isn't nearly as firm as is needed. There could be lots of small problems here and only an experienced Stata user is well advised to start trying this. For example, small differences in case, spacing, wording, etc. will make this much more complicated than you might hope. That said, you could run this code in each dataset. foreach v of var * { local vlbl : var label `v' if `"`vlbl'"' != "" { local newname = strtoname(`"`vlbl'"') rename `v' `newname' } } But I've not thought seriously about everything you need to do. Keep a copy of all datasets unchanged. Nick n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk Martin Weiss help mf_strtoname comes to mind... Daniel Jones I have a set of repeated cross sections (10 years) which I would like to combine into a single dataset. The problem is that the variable names are different across years -- it's a survey, so a variable I need might be called "Q13" one year and "Q17" the next. Variable labels seem to be constant across years, so I thought a solution might be to rename the the variables on the basis of their labels. I found a previous Statalist posting which describes such a procedure. However, for this to work, variable labels need to already be appropriately formatted to be variable names -- i.e., no spaces, etc. My variable labels are of the form "Education Volunteer - Past 12 Months." I'm assuming there's a way to remove spaces, etc. from variable labels, and then make them the variable names -- but I don't know what it is. Alternatively, it seems like there could be a simpler solution to merging all of these years together. Does anyone have any suggestions? * * 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/