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Re: st: More than 2 arguments for by
Ashim Kapoor wrote:
I want to do the following :
sort year state cnum votes
by year stata cnum votes : keep if _n==_N
That way I get the guy with the max no of votes.
Now when I do this for 1 or 2 arguments for by then it works, but not
for 4 arguments I have . Does by have a limit on how many arguments it
can have ?
I read -help by- and that does mention using by in the following
fashion : -- > by year ( state) . Do I need to put in brackets for the
other arguments?
Could someone please clarify?
You might want to use the slightly more direct -bysort-...
bysort year state cnum votes : keep if _n == _N
However, I don't think this is what you want. You haven't explained
what the variables are, but lets assume that we have...
year : year of voting
state : state of voting
cnum : candidate number
votes : number of votes
It sounds as though you want to find the candidate with the maximum
number of votes in each year/state (as I'm assuming your cnum will be
unique within this grouping).
What you probably then want is...
bysort year stata (votes) : keep if _n == _N
The use of the brackets is explained extremely clearly -man by-....
"The varlist1 (varlist2) syntax is of special use to programmers.
It verifies that the data are sorted by
varlist1 varlist2 and then performs a by as if only varlist1 were
specified. For instance,
by pid (time): gen growth = (bp - bp[_n-1])/bp
performs the generate by values of pid but first verifies that the
data are sorted by pid and time within pid."
So in my example your data is grouped by year and state and within that
its ordered by the number of votes.
Neil
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