Re: st: Drop columns based on an argument

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

For "columns" read "variables".

Look again at the syntax of -drop-. You can -drop- observations or
variables, so there are two syntaxes, which you can't mix.

But your syntax sounds the wrong way round. It sounds as if you want
something like

forvalues i=2/1285 {
         if var`i'[1]=="#ERROR" {
                  drop var`i'
        }
}

The other problem sounds like

replace id = substr(id, 1, 6) if substr(id, -4, .) == "(PE)"

I've often commented on this list on people trying regex when
something more basic suffices. (There is no -regex- command;
presumably you mean regex functions.)

Nick


On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:15 PM, thomas bourveau
<thomas.bourveau@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a dataset that I will have to reshape but I am facing two
> challenges for now. My dataset is currently organized as follows:
>
> The first column (var1) contains different dates.
>
> The next columns (var2-var1285) contains my variable of interest.
> However, the first line contains the identifier of the firm and then
> the value of the variable of interest.
>
>
> My first problem is that some identifiers are not valid, and then the
> first line returns an error message (string format). I want to drop
> all columns with an error message. I have tried the following code:
>
> forvalues i=2(1)1285{
> drop var`i' if var`i'[1]=="#ERROR"
> }
>
> However, it returns the following message: "invalid syntax".
>
> My second problem is that the valid identifiers are of the following
> form, 6 figures ending by (PE):
>
> example : 123456(PE)
>
> I need to eliminate the (PE) at the end of each identifier. I have
> tried to use the regex command but it did not worked well.
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