Re: st: Partitioning a main file in several with a speficied number of variables

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You can get a varlist from outside a dataset by using -describe
using-. Note particularly its -varlist- option.

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 7 April 2013 21:32, Nuno Soares <liststata@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm having a problem with some files that are taking a long time for
> Stata to process. These are based on the import of csv files and have
> about 5000 variables (labelled as v1 - v5000). Don't worry, these are
> not actual values, but only the way a given database provides data
> which I than have to treat in Stata.
>
> The treatment procedure is working fine, but Stata as some problems
> dealing with such a large number of variables. I noticed that, if I
> only have about 1000 variables, it takes Stata about one hour to
> process each file. However, if the 5000 variables are used, it just
> hangs up or takes almost 12 hours to do the same stuff.
>
> So, to speed up the process, the solution is to brake the main files
> into files with 1000 variables (or less). The problem is that I don't
> know how to write a code in Stata that does this. If the files had
> always the 5000 variables, I would just drop/keep the variables as:
>
> preserve
> keep v1 v2-v1000
> save
> restore
>
> preserve
> keep v1 v1001-v2000
> save
> restore
>
> and so on (v1 must always be kept)
>
> The problem is for those files that have more/less than 5000
> variables, which I cannot know without opening each file.
>
> Does anyone know a way to automate this?
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