Re: st: loop with egen

[Nahla Betelmal <nahlaib@gmail.com>]

Dear all

many thanks Rich, and yes I had the variables in my command already.
this was not the problem. The issue was with each variable new name.

Thanks Nick, the loop works perfectly. I need to generate the
constants as variables to use in further equations and calculations
instead of writing them manually.

Many thanks again

Nahla


On 8 February 2013 13:38, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't believe that was your code.
>
> I suspect that you wrote something of the form
>
> foreach v of var <varlist> {
>       egen mean = mean(`v')
>       egen sd = sd(`v')
> }
>
> where instead of <varlist> you had a list of variable names.
>
> Second time around the loop, the problem is that -mean- already
> exists, and so the loop fails.
>
> You could make this loop legal by ensuring that each new variable has
> a different name
>
> foreach v of var <varlist> {
>       egen mean_`v' = mean(`v')
>       egen sd_`v'  = sd(`v')
> }
>
> but that would still be a bad idea. There is usually little point in
> generating lots of variables that just contain constants.
>
> su <varlist> will give you a list of means and standard deviations.
>
> For more precise control, consider
>
> . sysuse auto
> (1978 Automobile Data)
>
> . tabstat mpg weight, s(mean sd) c(s) format(%2.1f)
>
>     variable |      mean        sd
> -------------+--------------------
>          mpg |      21.3       5.8
>       weight |    3019.5     777.2
> ----------------------------------
>
> Nick
>
> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Nahla Betelmal <nahlaib@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am trying to generate the mean and standard deviation for more than
>> 30 variables. I tried to do that using the following loop
>>
>> foreach v of var {
>> egen mean = mean(`v')
>> egen sd = sd(`v')
>> }
>>
>> however, it only generate the mean and standard deviation for the
>> first variable only.
>>
>> I got this message :mean already defined
>> r(110);
>>
>> what should I add to the loop , so it can generate the mean and
>> standard deviation for each variable in separate column?
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