Re: st: Renaming variables using foreach

[Steve Nakoneshny <scnakone@ucalgary.ca>]

It would probably make more sense to rename your variables to an informative shorthand and to then give the full description as a label. However, copying the varname and applying it as a label is pretty easy to do with a loop:

foreach x of varlist Agricultural_raw_materials_expor - Value_lost_due_to_electrical_ou {
	label var `x' "`x'"
}

Steve


On 2012-06-26, at 4:08 PM, Suryadipta Roy wrote:

> Dear Nick and Steve,
> 
> Thank you very much the help! Actually, I forgot to mention that I am
> using Stata 11.2, and what I really wanted to do was to "label" the
> variables with the existing variable names (since the current variable
> names from the World Develepment Indicators are too long). The idea
> was thus to change the long names to var1, var2, etc, and then use
> -label- . I would now check if I can somehow manage to get the
> variables labelled by their variable names (obviously I can do that
> manually as well) in Stata 11.
> 
> And, Nick's solution works and will read into it very carefully.
> 
> Thanks again!
> Suryadipta.
> 
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Steve Nakoneshny <scnakone@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>> Suryadipta,
>> 
>> Your loop fails as you are asking for each variable in your varlist to be renamed var1. Assuming you're using Stata 12, you don't need a loop to solve this issue. You can achieve your desired result (or some reasonable facsimile) using -rename-:
>> 
>> rename (Agricultural_raw_materials_expor - Value_lost_due_to_electrical_ou) var#, addnumber
>> 
>> See -help rename- for more details.
>> 
>> Steve
>> 
>> 
>> On 2012-06-26, at 3:20 PM, Suryadipta Roy wrote:
>> 
>>> Dear Statalisters,
>>> 
>>> I am currently learning looping in Stata and is stuck with the
>>> following problem: I have about 150 variables that I want to rename as
>>> var1 var2, etc.. upto var 150. I tried the following:
>>> 
>>> local i = `i' + 1
>>> foreach x of varlist  Agricultural_raw_materials_expor -
>>> Value_lost_due_to_electrical_out  {
>>> 2. rename `x' var`i'
>>> 3. }
>>> 
>>> I am getting the following error message:
>>> var1 already defined
>>> r(110);
>>> 
>>> I find that only the first variable is renamed as "var1" and then the
>>> loop stopped running. Any help is greatly appreciated.
>>> 
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Suryadipta.
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