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RE: st: forvalues and _N


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: forvalues and _N
Date   Fri, 3 Sep 2004 12:21:32 +0100

Why this behaviour? 

In essence, -forvalues- expects a range, as defined 
by example in its syntax diagram. What is not quite 
spelled out in that syntax diagram is that all the elements
of the range must be explicit. 

So 

forval i = 1/_N { 
	...
} 

doesn't qualify. _N is not explicit enough; you are
expecting Stata to evaluate _N. It is happy enough 
to do that in other contexts, but not this one. 

forval i = 1/`=_N' { 
	...
} 

is a work-around. Stata's parser catches `=_N' and evaluates
it and passes the result to -forvalues-, so what -forvalues- 
actually sees is 1/74, or whatever. This feature was introduced
in Stata 7, but not documented until Stata 8. 

-display- is different, as part of its job is to evaluate 
before displaying. 

A quite different comment is that almost all loops over observations
can be avoided, but I can't say whether your problem is like that. 

Nick 
[email protected] 


John Wallace

> I have a problem using a forval loop to assign values to a 
> numeric variable
> (for brevity, assume that -encode- doesn't work here).  I 
> want to loop
> through the entire dataset, addressing each value in turn, so
> 
> .forval e = 1/_N
> 
> would appear to be the appropriate form.  I get an "invalid 
> syntax" error
> when I do so.
> 
> .di _N
> 
> gives me the expected result for this dataset, 2339.
> 
> .forval e = 1/2339
> 
> works as expected.
> How am I screwing this up?

Fred Wolfe 
 
> This will work:
> 
> forval e = 1/`=_N'

Nichols, Austin
 
> That's a very handy tool, indeed.  Cf.
> 
> #delimit;
> forval e = 1/5 {; di `e'; };
> forval e = 1/2+3 {; di `e'; };
> forval e = 1/`=2+3' {; di `e'; };
> 
> where the second example bombs for the same (?) reason 
> as forval e = 1/_N  but the third runs fine.


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