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st: RE: Selecting part of a LARGE file


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: RE: Selecting part of a LARGE file
Date   Fri, 6 Jun 2003 18:03:31 +0100

Hoetker, Glenn

> I have two files.  File A has about 5000 unique values of
> the variable
> PATENT, which is 7 characters long.  File B has 16 million
> observations
> and several million unique values for PATENT.  I want to do some
> manipulation involving File B, but only for the observations that
> correspond to the patent values found in File A.   I am
> currently using
> merge on the two files to do this (actually mmerge as a wrapper for
> ease), but wonder if there is an easier/faster way.
>
> I attempted using vallist.ado in File A to generate a long
> local macro
> (say, _useme) and then doing
>
> 	use FileB if index(patent, "'useme'")
>
> I get 0 observations in this case (even though I know there are some
> matches).  From the manual, it appears that index is
> limited to strings
> of 80 characters, anyway.

-vallist- is Patrick Joly's program.

Quite apart from the 80 characters limit, what it does
does nothing to help with your problem.

Stripping down to a miniature analogue, suppose you have
a string variable -myvar- which takes on distinct values
"a" "b" "c".

-vallist myvar- will return that set of values as a
space-separated list, i.e.

"a b c"

If you then say

... if index(myvar,"a b c")

then this is true for _none_ of the observations;
naturally, you report the same for your dataset.

Closer to your problem are approaches detailed in

http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/characteristics.html

and

http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/selectid.html

which may well be (the equivalent) of what you are doing
with -mmerge-.

Nick
[email protected]

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