st: RE: looping to value of a variable

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

Your example is not very clear. You have FU* and by implication DFU*. Do you want to flag missings or non-missings? I can read your post either way. 

However, you (almost surely) do not need to loop over observations. It is sufficient to loop over variables. 

See a review in this territory 

SJ-9-1  pr0046  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Speaking Stata: Rowwise
        (help rowsort, rowranks if installed) . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q1/09   SJ 9(1):137--157
        shows how to exploit functions, egen functions, and Mata
        for working rowwise; rowsort and rowranks are introduced

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

Richard Fox
I want to loop to the value of a variable. Let's say I have generated the number of non-missing values in a row of data (maxFU in example below). I want to loop to that value which clearly can differ between records.

The following does the job but feels like cheating.

egen maxFU = rownonmissing(FU1 FU2 FU3 FU4 FU5 )

count 
local N=r(N)
forvalues i = 1/`N' {
					local sp = maxFU[`i']
					forvalues j=1/`sp'	{
								qui replace flag`j'=1 if DFU`j'==.
								}
					}



There must be a simpler way; any ideas? 

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