st: RE: run through every values of a variable

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

Your -confirm- statement is illegal syntax, and putting -capture- in front will just eat the syntax error, so that is not the way to go. 

If you want to check whether any value is 555 then you can just go (e.g.) 

assert broker_id != 555 

count if broker_id == 555 

These are some of the ways are finding whether any value is 555. The first will be contradicted if any value is 555. The second will return a positive count in the same circumstance. 

Using a loop is _very_ inefficient here. Your loop is illegal because -forvalues- doesn't understand _N as such; you need to evaluate it as `=_N'. 

Your references are not getting any more precise! "stata resource and support page" does not remind me where I wrote that, as (let me put this in a David Hoaglin-like understatement) I have written various pieces on Stata here and there, including various FAQs. 

But no matter: whatever is a placefiller indicating some generic command. There is no official Stata command -whatever-. If you look closely at what was written, "whatever" should be in italic or indicated by <whatever>. If not, let me know where you found it and we will fix it. 

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

tashi lama

    I have a variable broker_id in my dataset as follows...

broker_id 

6429
131
244

and I have to see if "555" matches any of the values in a broker_id. Now, I think I could use some technique like 

 levelsof broker_id, clean 
 capture confirm var "555" 

but I am wondering if there is a st. forward way to do this using forvalues loop like this

1. When I did forvalues i=1/_N {

                   if broker_id[`i']=="555" {

                    ........

I get invalid syntax. I am not so sure... Could someone explain?

2. I see that Nick has given a way to do this in stata resource and support page 

sysuse auto      

foreach i in 0 1 {
 whatever if foreign == `i'

}

  I tried to run this and got unrecognized command whatever in return. Is it because whatever is an obsolete command? Any idea....


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