st: re: extracting variable names for use as string lists

[Kit Baum <kitbaum@mac.com>]

David said

I would like to rename multiple variables in a consistent way -- that 
is, to
abbreviate their names to 8 characters if they are any longer than this
(using 'abbrev').  I would like to use a structure something like:

foreach x in [list of variable names] {
	if length(`x')>8 {
		rename `x' abbrev(`x',8)
		}
	}



First of all you should use capture on the rename line to deal with the 
fact that some of these names may be invalid, in that you have mapped 
variable1 and variable2 into variable (or are trying to do so).

ds v*
local vvars `r(varlist)'
foreach v of local vvars {
...
}

will pick up the variables whose names start with v.

You may want to look at renvars (findit renvars) which will probably 
deal with the namespace collision problem.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html

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