st: Egen to sum across rows (with an if across rows)

[Lucy GELDER <l.gelder@ecu.edu.au>]

Dear Statalist,

I have a dataset which includes 157 columns of times in hours (t1-t157) and 157 columns of categories, with values A - D (cat1-cat157).

I want to sum across the columns by category, so that I end up with four columns timeA-timeD containing the total times for each category.

I have tried:

foreach cat in A B C D{

        egen wardtimeA= rowtotal(wardtime*) if (wardcat*)=="A"

}

and get the error "wardcat* invalid name". I presume this means I can't use the wild card in the if statement?

Does anyone know of a way I can do this without reshaping to data long.....this is a very large dataset and I would prefer to keep it wide if possible.

Thanks

Lucy Gelder


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