Thank you. Mutcode can take on many values, but because you pointed me
in the right direction, I got it to work now. I am new to Stata and I
tried to take the approach I would take when programming. Thanks
again.
Sander
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 7:59 PM, Michael Blasnik
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
>
> First, you are going about this in a very unStatalike manner -- you do not need
> a loop. Second, your use of foreach is clearly not following the allowed syntax
> as shown in help foreach (no -if- allowed).
>
> Here is a non-looping way of doing this, assuming that mutcode is either 0 or 1:
>
> by rin (mutcode): gen byte evermut=(mutcode[_N]==1)
> drop if evermut
>
> which can be reduced to just 1 line if you don't want to check through to be
> sure that the proper observations are flagged:
> by rin (mutcode): drop if mutcode[_N]==1
>
> This approach won't work if mutcode takes on missing values. In that case, you
> may want to look at egen functions like max and total which could easily
> identify groups that meet your criteria.
>
> Michael Blasnik
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sander" <[email protected]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 1:00 PM
> Subject: st: Foreach when dealing with a list of observations
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I was wondering if it's possible to go over a list of observations
> > with the foreach command. What I mean is the following: I have a data
> > set with persons identified by a (for the person) unique number,
> > called rin. However, when personal characteristics of the people in
> > the data set changed, a new record was made with the same
> > identification number. Now the problem is, that if certain
> > characteristics for a person have changed (which gives a mutation code
> > of 1 (mutcode==1)), I want that person out of the data set.
> >
> > What I tried is the following. The list of identification numbers that
> > I want out of the dataset can be obtained by this command:
> > list rin if mutcode==1
> >
> > However, I don't want to run "drop if rin==number" by hand, since
> > there are many observations. Therefore, I tried the following:
> > foreach x of l rin if mutcode==1 {
> > drop if rin=="`x'"
> > }
> >
> > Which doesn't work, unfortunately. I tried some other commands as well:
> > foreach x of rin if mutcode==1 {
> > drop if rin=="`x'"
> > }
> >
> > and
> >
> > foreach x in l rin if mutcode==1 {
> > drop if rin=="`x'"
> > }
> >
> > Which also don't work. I'm probably doing something very wrong here,
> > but I would really appreciate it if someone could take the time to
> > help me out with this.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Sander
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
