Re: st: -contract- hard-coded to generate frequencies with datatype long, can result in missing

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Or just -collapse (sum) fweights, by(byvars)- , of course. Sorry.

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 6:39 PM, László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com> wrote:
> Aaaand, my bad again. -collapse- with (count) will count only
> nonmissing observations, while -contract- does count observations
> where any of the byvars are missing (though drops zero-frequency
> cells). So I will need an auxiliary variable for collapse to work,
> then.
>
> And I forgot to mention fweights in my collapse example, of course,
> which are key to my use case, but work with both contract and
> collapse.
>
> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 6:34 PM, László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is just a public service announcement, so you won't lose the
>> better half of your workday like I just did:
>>
>> -contract- seems a nifty little official command for a single purpose,
>> but bit me hard: it is hard-coded to generate frequencies with the
>> data type long, which can then silently flip over to missing if you
>> have big data with more than 2 billion observations (probably coming
>> from fweights from aggregates though, as in my case).
>>
>> Probably -collapse (count) _freq=byvar1, by(byvar1 byvar2)- is the way
>> to go. I just knew -collapse- does not like string variables, but for
>> byvars it does.
>>
>> My bad.
>>
>> Laszlo
>> *
>> *   For searches and help try:
>> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
>> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
>> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

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