st: extract the value from one cell and past it in another cell

["Lingxiang Li" <lil7rpi@gmail.com>]

I am new to Stata and sorry if this problem seems to be too simple. I did my 
search online but failed to find any useful information.

I want to extract the value of one observation from a string variable and 
past it in another cell. (sounds like a Excel manipulation. Anyway, hope you 
get what I mean)

   Var1 (string variable)       Var2
1.    a                                       x
2.    ab
3.    abc                                    z


how do I extract “abc” from var1’s 3rd observation and past into the 
second observation of var2. so I want it to look like the following graph 
after the command

Var1 (string variable) Var2
1. a                                 x
2. ab                              abc
3. abc                             z

Question: what is the command? (since I want to do this many times in a loop 
fashion, so I cannot manually type: replace var2=”abc” if _n==2)


Thank you very much.

Billy Li 

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