Bookmark and Share

Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

st: conditional "keep" statement


From   David Souther <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   st: conditional "keep" statement
Date   Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:54:17 -0500

I'm combining (append & merge) hundreds of files which contain
hundreds or thousands of variables each, and at each stage of the
merge/append, I'd like to variables only if they are in a list that I
specify.
The issue is that not all of these datasets contain all the variables
in this list.  So, if I create a macro of my list,

local myvars  a1 a2 a3 d1 d2 d3

and then specify,

keep `myvars'

in the loop for each combination of data, I get the error that some
variable doesn't exist when it's not in the dataset.  I tried getting
around this with the -capture- command,

cap keep `myvars'

and using -ds-

ds `myvars'
keep `r(varlist)'

or,

ds `myvars', not
drop `r(varlist)'

and -ds- in combination with -capture- to no avail.   Any other ideas
(besides specifying the hundreds of variables to keep for each/every
loop)??

D.S.
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/


© Copyright 1996–2018 StataCorp LLC   |   Terms of use   |   Privacy   |   Contact us   |   Site index