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From | Joerg Luedicke <joerg.luedicke@gmail.com> |
To | statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu |
Subject | Re: st: recode non-numerical values |
Date | Mon, 2 May 2011 22:54:08 -0400 |
On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Jet <lsj555@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, everyone, > > I have a question regarding matching of nonnumerical values. > Suppose the original data looks like this: > > ID Drug ID > 1 d06662 > 2 d06665 > 3 d04878 > 4 d05048 > > Now suppose d06662 is a drug for hypertension, which I want to > code into "1", and all else into "0". I tried to destring the > variable, but it does not allow me doing so since it contains > characters. Any suggestion to handle this situation? > You have several options: 1) You could simply type: gen drug= DrugID=="d06662" (and maybe add replace drug= . if DrugID=="" in case it is empty) 2) Use encode (-help encode-) to create a categorical variable for drug type with the strings as value labels 3) If the d, the first digit letter in DrugID, carries no information (and if all drug ids have a meaningless first digit) you could remove it and then convert it into a numerical variable with destring. For example, you could type: gen drug=substr( Drug_ID, 2,5) (see -help substr-) J. * * 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/