st:stubs, ending with some number, are not available for all waves :-reshape-

[Amanda Fu <mandy.fu1@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

The Statalist archive already has had extensive discussion on
reshaping when the stubs are in the beginning of the variables names.
http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2006-04/msg00960.html

 I still have a question after checking the previous posts. I would
like to reshape a wide (unbalanced panel data of  with 20 waves) data
set into long structure. In the wide dataset all the time-variant
variables are named ending with a number `k' , i=1,2,...19, 20. When
some variables that are not available for some years, those variables
are not existent at all for the years they are not available.


The variables names are like ():
ID,  firm1,wage1, hour2, firm2,wage2,............hour20, firm20
(hour1 and wage20 do not exist because the information are not
available for all waves.)

The actual data set includes around 1000 time-variant variables. I
would like to reshape the whole data sets into long , not just a few
variables.

What I tried is:
------------------------------------------------------
unab var: *1
local stubs: subinstr local vars "1" "",all
reshape long `stubs',i(id) j(wave)
-----------------------------------------------------
 This causes problems for the variables that are not first created at
wave 1. However, if I use 20 instead of 1, I got similar problem for
those variables that are stopped being collected before wave 20.

Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you!

Best wishes,
Amanda Fu
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