Re: st: Re: expanding obs, then changing values based on that

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Although you solved your problem, other ways of doing it may be of interest.

Here's one:

reshape long var_ , i(teacher_id) string
keep if var_
drop var_

   On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Michael Costello
<michaelavcostello@gmail.com> wrote:
> Disregard, I solved it!
>
> I created a variable that counted all the teachers with the same
> teacher_id, then used that value to run a substring command which
> picked out the exact location in my string that I needed.  No repeats!
>  Thanks for helping me think things though!

> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 11:44 PM, Michael Costello
> <michaelavcostello@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Statlisters,
>> I have a dataset with a variable that asks teachers which section they
>> teach.  The options are sections a though e, and more than one answer
>> is allowed.  Thus:
>> teacher_id    var_a   var_b   var_c   var_d   var_e
>> 1             1       0       0       0       0
>> 2             1       1       1       0       0
>> 3             1       0       0       1       1
>> 4             1       0       0       1       0
>> I need to duplicate any observation that has a 1 for more than one of
>> var_a-var_e.  So I did:
>> egen var_total=rowtotal(var_a-var_e)
>> expand var_total
>> sort teacher_id
>> Now, for teacher #2 above for example, I need to assign one (and only
>> one?) of her three observations var_a=1, the second var_b=1 and the
>> third var_c=1.  This way I can create a new variable, "section" and
>> have observation for each section.  It would look like this in the
>> end:
>> teacher_id  section
>> 1           a
>> 2           a
>> 2           b
>> 2           c
>> 3           a
>> 3           d
>> 3           e
>> 4           a
>> 4           d
>> I tried to create a concatenated variable so that I could assign "a"
>> if the first number in the concatenated string (from the first table
>> above) ==1, "b" if the second number were ==1, etc.  The problem is
>> that I cannot figure out how to only change the second observation
>> within one teach_id number.  Stated differently, it's changing all,
>> not cycling though to the next observation.
>> I'm not sure if this is making sense, but if you have ideas, please let me know.

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