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]
Re: st: Routine for merging many text-files
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: Routine for merging many text-files
Date
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:21:07 +0000
This is not clear on how you get a -year- variable out of your datasets.
Nick
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Simon Falck <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have about 100 text files that I want to merge in to a longitudinal datab= ase and wonder if there is a routine that I can apply to ease this work.
>
> The text-files have different periods but the same datastructure, which is = a wide format that looks something like this,
>
> Id y1 y2 y3
> 1 10 30 40
> 2 11 31 41
> ...and so on..
>
> If I would apply the standard procedure to create the database the script w= ould look something like this for two text-files, (as an example but would = look the same for the 100 text-files)
>
> *Insert dataset 1 from textfile and save as .dta insheet using "C:\User\dataset1", tab reshape long y, i(id) j(year) rename y var1 save "C:\User\dataset1.dta"
>
> *Insert dataset 2 from textfile and save as .dta insheet using "C:\User\dataset2", tab reshape long y, i(id) j(year) rename y var2 save "C:\User\dataset2.dta"
>
> *Merge dataset 1 and 2 to key-file containing joint id=B4s.
> use "C:\User\id.dta"
> merge 1:m id year using "C:\User\dataset1.dta"
> drop _merge
> merge 1:m id year using "C:\User\dataset2.dta"
> drop _merge
>
> The resulting database would look something like this,
>
> Id year var1 var2
> 1 1 10 100
> 1 2 15 75
> 1 3 20 65
> 2 1 11 112
> 2 2 17 80
> 3 1 36 110
> ...and so on..
>
> Since I have about 100 text-files that (1) needs to be converted into .dta,=
> (2) reshaped into a long-format, (3) rename variables, and (4) merged into= a joint database, I wonder if someone know how I could write a routine to = ease this work which otherwise is repetitive and result in a very large .do= file.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/