Re: st: FW: forvalues question...

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

I take it that you want another way of getting a -collapse-  without
typing out all the variable names.

Your tentative code is a long way from legal syntax, but the spirit is right.

Code might be

local call (sum)

forval j = 1/20 {
      local call `call'  var`j'_s=var`j'
}

collapse `call', by(year)

Nick

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Mahometa, Michael J
<michael.mahometa@ssc.utexas.edu> wrote:

> I've got a dataset that has multiple rows for one year, with several sequential variables. And, I'd like to sum what happens over the year (using something like collapse). I have 20 variables and the data looks like:
>
> Year   var1  var2  var3  var4  var5 ....
> 1999   2     5     6     1     4
> 1999   4     1     5     2     5
> 1999   1     3     5     6     7
> 2000   6     5     1     3     8
> 2000   1     1     2     3     6
> ...
>
> So the current "brute force" method is:
> collapse (sum) var1_s=var1 var2_s=var2 ///
> var3_s=var3 var4_s=var4, by(year)
>
> But this seems in-elegant.
>
> Is there a solution like forvalues? Something like:
> collapse (sum) ///
> forvalues num = 1(1)20 { ///
> var'num'_s = var'num' ///
> }, by(year)
>
> (Which doesn't work.)
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