Dear all
I have a string variable x1 with a list of values. I want to create a numerical variable x2 in which the numbers correspond to the string values in x1 in an ordered fashion (as a counter).
To illustrate, lets assume x1 contains all letters of the alphabet, and I want x2 to contain a counter that corresponds to the position of the letter in the alphabet, i.e. x1=a > x2=1, x1=b > x2=2, x1=c > x2=3, etc...
This seems to me like a combination of foreach and forvalues, but I cannot find information on whether and how such thing is implementable in Stata.
Hope I have made myself clear.
Thanks for your help
John.
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