Ann Fitzmaurice
>
> i have a data set with four variables, year ca age and n,
> where n is the
> number of each combination or the other three
> e.g.
>
> yeat ca age n
> 1995 1 13 309
> 1995 1 14 420
> 1995 2 13 363
>
> the years can range from 1995-2002, ca from 1-6 and age from 13-19
>
> what i would like to do is to expand the data set that i have
> one line for
> each case so for the first line above i would have 309
> duplicated lines
>
> i have try using expand but it does not give me the data set
> i want (i know
> the total n when expanded)
. expand n
should do this. To advise further, I think we need you to say
precisely what you tried and in what sense it doesn't work.
> on another point , is stata8 case sensitive , i tried the following
> tab ca - this would not work
> but
> tab CA would - if stata 8 is case sensitive is it possible to
> turn it off
As far as I am aware, Stata has been case-sensitive since
it first appeared in 1985. There has been no change in
its behaviour in this respect in Stata 8.
Case-sensitivity applies in various ways. As far as Stata's
inbuilt commands are concerned, you can't change their names.
I guess that you want case-insensitivity to variable names,
so that
. tab ca
should work on the variable -CA- whenever there is in fact no
variable -ca-, but a variable -CA-. Presumably what you would
also want is that
. tab ca
should work on the variable -ca- whenever it exists.
In this particular case, a preprocessor program could, in
principle, be written in the Stata language which would try out
various possibilities for you. But you would be obliged if you wanted this
behaviour to type something like
. insensitive tab ca
every time you wanted this. That is, there is no switch
. set insensitive on
or anything akin. In practice I doubt that any
Stata programer would want to write this preprocessor, because either
they wouldn't want to use it themselves or they couldn't
see a way of doing this in some generality without the
possibility of side-effects you wouldn't want.
If your variable names are problematic, the best way
of dealing with it is to change them. Your near neighbour
Ada Ma started a thread yesterday on Statalist on
changing upper case variable names to lower case.
Nick
[email protected]
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