[email protected]
>
> I had a do file set up to calculate the age-specific rates
> for cancer in
> specified health authorities. However this program became slow and
> laborious as I could only do this for one health authority
> at a time.
> Through website renevation, the person that mainly uses
> this do file is
> running the do file for the same ten health authorities
> every time. I would
> like to reduce running time by having an option to state
> that you would like
> to look at all ten health authorities, but still have the
> option that you
> may only want to look at a number less than ten. The
> syntax below runs
> through the while loop one, giving results for the first
> health authority
> "barnsley". However, when it comes to the second run, it
> keeps $ha as
> barnsley, even though my counter q increases in value. Any
> suggestions, my
> guess is a simple syntax error.
I can't follow all the logic of what you are trying
to do here. But you are doing one thing which
I suspect you do not want to do.
Focusing on your second request, global ha
will contain a name after the user has
given input: let's say it is "barnsley".
You then say, depending on `q',
local $ha "<wherever>"
which Stata interprets as
local barnsley "<wherever>"
That is,
1. Substitution first: the reference to $ha is replaced
by the contents of that macro.
2. Execution second: the resulting statement then
defines a local macro.
That is, what you are doing is indirectly
defining a local macro, which you never
use.
I will guess that asking for a number first is
just the way that you thought of programming
this. However, if I were user I might just want to
type the names all at once, which would mean something like this
display "Which health authorities would you
like to look at? (separate by spaces)" _request(ha)
foreach a of global ha {
local a = lower("`a'")
outsheet using `a', replace
winexec "C:\program files\microsoft office\office\excel.exe" `a'.out
}
One small detail is that you do not need to oblige
the user to type in lower case.
However, this code -outsheet-s the same data
irrespective of the request. That can't
be right: presumably you need to read in
the data, or specify a subset of the existing
data, first.
Nick
[email protected]
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