st: Re: double loop issue

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

I think you have your parentheses misplaced for the inner loop, but since 
you don't actually show us your real commands (at least what you show is 
clearly illegal syntax) and you don't describe what you want in much detail, 
it's hard to answer with much confidence.  If the inner loop is just meant 
to rename all of the variables , then you want the closing brace immediately 
after the rename statement.

foreach var in capital spending investment transfers {
ren `var' `var'_`p'
}

Also, if you are actually trying to save a file with the same name as the 
existing file (as in: -save c:\filename.dta-), then it won't work the second 
time around without a replace option and if you do that then the variable 
names will be changed in the original file.  Perhaps your actual code 
appends _`p' to the saved file name or uses a tempfile since it seems like 
you only use that file for a merge.

Please try to show the actual commands when asking for help.  Also, your 
overall objective sounds like it may be similar to some existing Stata 
command (some variant on cross, joinby, and/or merge)

Michael Blasnik

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Molly Lipscomb" <molly_lipscomb@yahoo.com>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 4:38 PM
Subject: st: double loop issue



> Hi,
> I have a loop inside a loop so that I can merge a file into another file 
> by several different variables (I have data on cities, and I need to merge 
> in the data on cities by each city crossed in each observation).
> Right now I have the following code:
> forvalues p=1/55 {
> use C:\filename.dta
> foreach var in capital spending investment transfers ...
> ren `var' `var'_`p'
> save C:\filename.dta
> ..and then I open up the master data and merge in the renamed variables.
> }
> }
>
> The problem is that stata will only rename the first variable in my 
> variable list--here capital, it ignores the other variables.
> How do I fix this?
> Thanks.
> Molly
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