Two kinds of answer:
1. As you -reshape- to wide a variable name like
-foo- will become the stub of a set of
variable names, so in many cases a wildcard like
-foo*- will be sufficient to characterise
the set. That wouldn't be precise enough if
you also had e.g. -foot-. You might need
e.g. -foo????-.
Typically you can loop over such
a set of variables using -foreach- without
knowing how many of them exist. One way to
count them would be
unab foo : foo*
local nvars : word count `foo'
2. It may be that what you want to do
is much more efficiently done within the long
structure before the -reshape-, or without the
-reshape-.
Nick
[email protected]
Jason Rachlin
>
> I am reshaping my data so each date becomes a column. I will
> not know how many
> dates are in my dataset and thus will not know how many
> columns I have. I'd like
> to loop across the columns performing an operation once for each date.
>
> > program then loops over these dates performing a function.
> I'd like to loop
> > until I hit the last date in my dataset which will change
> each time I run the
> > program depending on the size of the dataset. Can someone
> please recommend an
> > efficient way to identify my last column so I can define NumDays?
> >
> > local NumDays = ?
> > local i = 1
> > while `i' <= NumDays {
> > ...
> > }
> >
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