Re: st: "Wrong" result with encode / merge ?

[Philipp Rehm <Philipp.Rehm@gmx.de>]

Assume you have these id7temp codes in your master data-set:
AT18679
AT18680
AT18681

Assume you have these id7temp codes in your using data-set:
AT18679
AT18681
AT18682

If you -encode- the id7temp variable in each data-set, you will get the 
following id7 variables:

In the master data-set:
1=AT18679
2=AT18680
3=AT18681

In the using data-set:
1=AT18679
2=AT18681
3=AT18682

That is, encodes simply assigns numbers to each string.

If you -merge- the using data-set with the master data-set on id7, you 
will get the following (wrong) match:
1 "AT18679" = 1 "AT18679"
2 "AT18680" = 2 "AT18681"
3 "AT18681" = 3 "AT18682"

That's not what you want. I don't think that you should -encode- your 
values. Simply -merge- on id7temp, not id7.

HTH,
Philipp


Thomas Erdmann wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a dataset with ids that look like: AT18679U (two strings followed by
> 5 numbers, optionally followed by another string)
>
> Between the two datasets I would like to merge only the first 7 digits are
> equal, therefore I generated
>
> generate id7temp=substr(id,1,7)
> encode id7temp, gen(id7)
> sort id7
>
> and merged the two datasets by id7. When I quality checked the results there
> were several mismatches, which don't seem to happen if I use the string id
> and not the encoded one. Why is that?
>
> Thanks in advance
> -Tom
>
>
>
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