One way to do what you want grows out of the fact that you are not
obliged to feed -foreach- a varlist. You could feed it an arbitrary
list, of which one item might be
"payor_1 payor_2 payor_3 payor_4 payor_5 payor_6"
Or
payor_?
And then you work on each item, expanding it to a varlist as necessary.
This sounds like the sort of problem for which working out a clever way
to do it consumes far more time than letting Stata crunch its way
through.
Nick
[email protected]
Jeph Herrin
I have hundreds of variables that I need to loop through
and process. Some of them are grouped together because they
represent different options that are not mutually exclusive;
for example, "Insurance type: check all that apply:" has
results stored in:
payor_1
payor_2
payor_3
payor_4
payor_5
payor_6
I have a datum -type- associated with each that tells me it is part of a
"multiselect" (sic) question, so when I loop through all my variables:
foreach V of varlist `biglist' {
gettype(`V')
if `type'=="M" {
<do stuff>
}
.
.
.
}
The ... handles every other types of variable. However, when I
<do stuff> I'd like to handle all the variables in that particular
group, eg, payor_1-payor_6. I can do this, but then I need to advance
the -foreach- to the variable *after* payor_6.
One thought I had was to reference the variables by their number, which
is available via -describe, number- (I'd have to -keep `biglist'- first)
but I'm not sure how to refer to a variable by its number, and can't
find any info on how to do so.
Does anyone see how to make this idea - or any other- work so I can skip
ahead in a -foreach- loop?
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