st: filter by value labels

[<Stefan.Gawrich@hlpug.hessen.de>]

Hi Statalisters,

I have just copied the contents of a health database to Stata for analytic purposes.
This de-normalization of the relational data structure leads to highly redundant data 
(e.g. 1000* the same hospital address).

I frequently search for names and addresses to identify units (we only hold an internal unit ID, not known to data requesters) 
E.g.: Dr. John Doe from Frankfurt wants some information on his data.

I could check:"tab unitid if firstname == "*John*" & lastname == "Doe" & town == "*Frankfurt*"
If only one "unitid" results I could resume with the unitid


To keep the dataset at a reasonable size I would like to store address data encoded.
But is there any function that can identify cases by value labels instead of values?
I don't know of any simple way (without too much extra scripting or data transformation).


Stefan Gawrich
Hesse Health State Office
Dillenburg
Germany



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