Re: st: Searching for files with a particular *value* of a variable

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You can approach this in various ways. I haven't used either of the
user-written programs you mentioned but let's just approach it from
first principles:

local present
quietly foreach f in <filelist> {
            use `f'
            count if <varname> == <value>
            if r(N) local present `present' `f''
}

di `present'

You'd need something subtle if your filenames contain spaces.

Nick

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 6:23 AM, Partho Sarkar <partho.ss+lists@gmail.com> wrote:

>  I need to search through a large number of files in a folder (with
> subfolders) for the presence of a particular *value* of a variable.  I
> know (and have found very useful) the -lookfor_all- program ( by Zurab
> Sajaia, Michael Lokshin and Dan Blanchette ) (SSC download) can find
> occurences of variables, labels etc in a directory path.  I also just
> discovered Daniel Klein's -lookfor_val-  (SSC download), which can
> "Search for value patterns in *current* data set", but it doesn't
> offer an option to search through a list of files . Can anyone here
> suggest a way out?
>
> [ I can think of a way to combine the above two utilities, using
> -lookfor_all-  to locate the files, and then  -lookfor_val-  to loop
> through all the files thus found, and using the returned results for
> each file  to flag the matching files.  But since  -lookfor_all-  does
> not (as far as I can see) return the names of the files it finds in a
> stored result (only displaying them on the screen), I cannot easily
> think of a relatively simple process to get what I need by combining
> the two programs. ]

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