st: RE: AW: RE: AW: Identifying unique values with codebook

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

-inspect- has its fans, but I am not among them. 

-inspect- seems to regard strings as failed numerics, and refuses to
look inside. It would be simpler to ignore all strings. 

I wonder whether some kind of review of -inspect- is called for.
Whatever -inspect- does that differs from -codebook- could be taken into
-codebook-, perhaps. -inspect- could remain available under version
control. 

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

Martin Weiss

A "string representation" seems to work with -codebook-, but not
-inspect-
which claims to find o unique values...


*************
clear*
inp str25 mystrvar
loooooooooooooooooooooooooooonnggg
verylooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnngggg
end
ins
codebook
*************

Nick Cox

As Martin says, at root this is a precision problem. 

Neither -codebook- nor anything else is to blame if it is presented with
the same values. To hold very large integers you may need to consider
-long- as another possibility, or even a string representation. 

Martin Weiss

As -help data_types- says: "doubles have 16 digits of accuracy." So you
can
increase the digits of your "y" up to the point where even -double- can
do
nothing for you:

*************
clear
set obs 10
gen byte x=_n
codebook x
gen double y1 = 1000000000000000 + x
gen double y2 = 10000000000000000 + x
gen double y3 = 100000000000000000 + x
gen double y4 = 1000000000000000000 + x
codebook y?
ins y?
*************


Interestingly, -inspect- seems to differ from -codebook-`s opinion.

Walter Garcia-Fontes

I stumped into a problem when identifying unique values of a numeric
variable using "codebook": if the values are large they will be
identified as the same value.  

For instance I have a variable x with the following values:
0, 1, 2, ... 10 (that is 10 different values)

codebook x 
reports "unique values: 10"

Now do 
gen y = 100000000000000000 + x

codebook y
reports "unique values = 1"

Is this a feature?

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