RE: st: RE: Re: How to perform calculations on a set of tempvars

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

The article referred to by Martin gives a fairly detailed survey of working row-wise.

Francisco: You do not substantiate your claim of not working properly. I see no reason why any row-wise function should not work properly with varlists given by macros. 

You just need to respect the syntax of each function. In particular, -min()- expects a set of variable names separated by commas, whereas the -egen- row functions expect varlists as strictly so defined in Stata, space-separated or wildcarded. Now wildcards are not completely out of the question in Stata for temporary variables, but it is best to think otherwise. (Your earlier example inserted a wildcard symbol _inside_ a macro name, which as you saw is illegal. Putting wildcard symbols _outside_ macro names won't usually work either.) 

In either case (space or comma), it is often a good idea to accumulate variable names as you loop over some set of columns. For example, 

local J = <number of columns> 
forval j = 1/`J' { 
	tempvar foo 
	egen `foo' = <function of some variable to do with column `j'> 
	local foolist `foolist' `foo' 
} 

As each new -foo- is generated, its name is added to the list. 

As is explicit above, `foolist' is a space-separated list. To insert commas, 

local cfoolist : subinstr local foolist " " ",", all 

Then feed `foolist' or `cfoolist' as desired to the function or command in question. 

If you feel more comfortable with the more complicated version 

local J = <number of columns> 
forval j = 1/`J' { 
	tempvar foo`j'  
	egen `foo`j'' = <function of some variable to do with column `j'> 
	local foolist `foolist' `foo`j'' 
}

that's fine. The key point either way is that each -tempvar- call produces a new, distinct variable name. So long as you keep track of the previously produced names you can remain in business. 

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

francesco manaresi

Thank you, your answer (and the reference) was pretty useful.
I ended up creating variables, however, since most of the "rowwise"
functions do not seem to work properly with macros.

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Martin Weiss <martin.weiss1@gmx.de> wrote:

> The -min()- function does not take a -varlist-, but a comma-separated list
> of arguments, hence the error. Try -egen, rowmin()- instead:
> http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=pr0046

Francesco manaresi

> I created sets of tempvars of the type
> var_`i'_`x'
> containing the result of a statistic (say, a p-value) calculated for
> variable `x' in State `i'
>
> I would like to perform calculations and have the result in another
> macro. For instance, I want the minimum of all the p-values by State.
> However, Stata does not accept the following syntax:
>
> tempvar minimum
> g `minimum' = min(`var_`i'_*')
>
> invalid syntax
> r(198);
>
> I believe this is because Stata doesn't accept asterisks (jolly
> character) within macronames.
> Am I right? What can I do alternatively, apart from creating hundreds
> of real variables?

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