st: nested loop with string values

[Claudia Rangel <clrangel@gmail.com>]

Dear Stata list members

apologies for the newbie question, but I have spent two days reading
and my first attempt at a nested loop is still not working.

I have a long list of variables  (i.e. ecymacnia13 ecymacnib13
ecymacnic13 ecymadnia13 ecymadnib13 ecymadnic13), which basically
identify age groups "a b...f" and income groups "a b c...j".

I am trying to generate one variable holding the income values
according to the age group for each observation on the dataset (in
variable ageflgecy: a (<34) b (35-54) c(45-64)...), and hopefully
reducing the  5 X 10 variables to just 10 income variables.

I was able to create a similar loop but the variable names contain
numbers instead of strings for the age and income groups.

This is one of my latest attempts:


tokenize "a b c d e f g h i j"
forval i =1/10  {
gen ecymani``j''13 =.
forval i =1/6{
replace ecymani``j''13 = ecyma`i'ni`j'13 if ageflgecy ==`i'
          }
}


Thanks for any suggestion.
Claudia
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