st: variable labels and reshape--reinserting en masse

[Hewan Belay <hewan_belay@yahoo.com>]

Dear Statalist, 

I have been puzzling over this now for a good amount of time, and unsuccessfully scouring the archives for an example like this. I am trying to reintroduce variable labels to variables after the dataset has been reshaped from long to wide. The reason I wasn't able to find the solution in the archives is: Unlike the cases on the web, I have lots of variables with the same stub, and want to write a command that can apply for all of them. To see what I mean, consider the below dataset as a toy example of my case:

clear
set obs 20
g hh_id= 1 in 1/5
replace hh_id= 2 in 6/10
replace hh_id= 3 in 11/15
replace hh_id= 4 in 16/20
by hh_id, s: g serial_no=_n
g biq5  = round(35*uniform())
g biq6a = round(82*uniform())
g biq6b = round(4 *uniform())
g biq8_2= round(16*uniform())
label var biq5 "this is one label"
label var biq6a "this is another label"
label var biq6b "yet another one"
label var biq8_2 "My last and final label"

Now, I want to then reshape this so that each household (hh_id) is one row, with the variable "serial_no" used to reshape. In other words, after the reshape, each variable will become 5 variables. In this example I only have 4 "biq" variables, but in my actual dataset I have many, many more, approximately 45, in other cases more. What I would like to do, is for example after the reshape, the variables biq51, biq52, ..., biq55 to all have the same variable label which reads "this is one label". I don't want to need to use 45 lines to do this. Is there some way I can do something akin to:

for any 5 6a 6b 8_2: local myvarlab_X : variable label biqX

(in order to save the variable labels. And then next, reshape and retrieve labels)

reshape wide biq* , i(hh_id) j(serial_no)
foreach y in 5 6a 6b 8_2 {
  foreach v of varlist biq`y' {
  label variable `v' "`myvarlab_'`y'"
  }
}

Unfortunately, the above commands did not work, nor did some variations of the above that I tried.

Thanks so much for any insights someone may have!
Hewan   


      
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