Michael,
Thank you for your quick and detailed suggestion.
And I'm sorry for my late reply.
As you say, I still don't fully understand how to use
-tempfile-, and your instruction is of much help.
Following your advice, I re-modified the codes and it ran
successfully.
Besides, as you point out, I surely brought unnecessary
complications to the codes by using a macro as part of the
tempfile name.
Instead, I simplfied the codes as below:
foreach file in sysdsn32 sysdsn33 sysdsn34 {
use `file'
sort patid
tempfile temp
save "`temp'", replace
use sysdsn31
sort patid
capture drop _merge
merge patid using "`temp'"
save sysdsn31, replace
}
And it also ran successfully.
P.S.
There seems no handy command in Stata to verify the
consistency of two files.
# though commands to verify the consistency of two
variables exist.
Maybe using -summarize- etc. before/after splitting the
datafile is the easiest way to do so.
K.I.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
