Re st: destring_loop

[daniel klein <klein.daniel.81@googlemail.com>]

As Phil shows, no loops are needed here. Another solution is

unab vars : *
gettoken first vars : vars
destring `vars' ,replace

If I was writing a do-file, I would probably use the -ds- approach.
There is one line less typing involved, and it is presumably easier to
understand (for a lot of people). Writing a program, I would rely on
my code, because -ds- is (too) powerful, meaning that it is  about 300
lines of interpreted code, where only two lines are needed for this
specific problem.

Even though it is not needed here, Stata stores the number of
variables in the current dataset in c(k). A loop would look like

forv j = 2/`=c(k)' {
   [...]
}

Best
Daniel

--
I have imported an Excel worksheet to Stata but all numerical
variables was converted to string.

I want to use destring to convert these string variables to numeric
for all variables except the first  variable.
Imagine there are 10 variables (Var 1 – Var 10) and the first variable
should remain in string format.
I have write the following command and it works correctly.
destring Var2– Var10, replace
This conversion (string to numeric) should be done for a lot of data
set with varying length and in each data set the first variable should
remain in string format.
I want to write a loop for these task and want to use this command in
that loop but I don’t khow how is possible to call second variables
till the end as we usually done for numeric values ( for example
2/max)
Would you please help me to find a good solution?

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/