st: Encoding and matching string values

["Florian Seliger" <florian.seliger@gmx.de>]

Hi,
we have about 300 individual company files, each file with up to 100,000 patents. To each patent, up to 500 patent_numbers and citations (string values) are assigned.  In the next step, we would like to put all files together and match the values to each other.

First, we  want to decrease the enormous sizes of the datasets by using the encode command on the strings.

However, after encoding each individual file’s variables and using the append command, the numerical values cannot be decoded correctly at all so that the string values become wrong.

The reason is that STATA messes up the the numerical values after appending the dataset.
Therefore, we search for a possibility to use the encode command, but still keep the original string values after appending the datasets in a way that a matching is possible.

Thank you in advance,
Florian
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