st: infiling a series of ASCII files

["Sascha O. Becker" <sascha.becker@gmx.de>]

Dear Stata listers,

I have a series of ASCII files that have names carrying the year and 
month as part of their names:

myfile_1999_01.txt
myfile_1999_02.txt
...
myfile_2002_12.txt

and want to read them in using one and the same dictionary.

I have a do-file (mydata.do) in which I loop year and month

***
foreach year in 1999(1)2002 {;
   foreach month in 1(1)12 {;

	infile using mydict.dct, clear;
	save "$root\Data\myfile_`year'_`month'.dta", replace;

   };
};
***

In order to call the correct ASCII files, I need to adress them in my 
*.dct file (mydata.dct) in the first line.

+++++

Using locals does not work:

dictionary using "myfile`year'_`month'.txt"	{
	STUFF
}

because Stata does not carry them over to the *.dct file.

+++++

So, I thought, I'd use macros and add the following line to the above loop:

global year "`year'"
global month "`month'"

and then call them in my *.dct file

1) dictionary using "myfile_$year_$month.txt"	

or

2) dictionary using "myfile_{$year}_{$month}.txt"	{

but this does not work either.

Do you have any suggestions on this?


Best regards, Sascha Becker

--

Dr. Sascha O. Becker
Center for Economic Studies
University of Munich
Schackstr. 4 - 80539 Munich, Germany
Tel +49 (89) 2180-6252   http://www.lmu.de
Fax +49 (89) 39 73 03    sbecker@lmu.de
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