Brent,
On 2/8/07, Brent Fulton <[email protected]> wrote:
I am using stata 9 and want to know whether stata creates an index in loops
that I can use to pull from a local macro. For my end result, I would like
the following variables to be created:
var1_county, var2_county, var3_county
I did the following:
local a "var1 var2 var3"
foreach x of local a{
local b "`b' `x'"
}
*the loop above results in the following: local b "var1_zip var2_zip
var3_zip"
In contrast to your described desired content of local b, the local
macro b will not contain what you indicated. It will rather contain
var1 var2�var3. In order to achieve what you wanted the loop should
look the following:
local a "var1 var2 var3"
foreach x of local a{
local b "`b' `x'_zip"
}
di `"`b'"'
sort county
foreach x of local b{
by county: egen `x'_county=total(`x')
}
But this creates the variables: var1_zip_county, var2_zip_county,
var3_zip_county
Is there a way to do this: see*
sort county
foreach x of local b{
by county: egen *grab the appropriate element of local a*_county=total(`x')
}
One way could be to have it both in one loop. Like this:
local a "var1 var2 var3"
foreach x of local a{
by country: egen `x'_county = total(`x'_zip)
}
To come back to your question whether Stata creates an index when
processing a -foreach- loop. I am not aware of such a feature.
However, you could create your own and use it after tokenizing it with
-tokenize- This could look like the following:
//create a local containing a list of variablen names
local a var1 var2 var3
//create a local containing another list based on the first one
foreach x of local a {
local b `b' `x'_zip
}
//a third loop which creates some summary statistics from variables in local a.
//This approach relies heavily on the assumption that element order in local a
//and local b are both in such way that it does make sense.
local i=1
tokenize `a'
foreach x of local b {
by county: gen ``i''_county=total(`x')
local ++i
}
Compared to the first solution suggested, I would say the latter is a
little more awkward und requires more "programming" than actually
necessary.
hth
Sebastian
*
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