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Re: st: Renaming variables, bis


From   Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Renaming variables, bis
Date   Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:55:57 +0100

You received two replies earlier which you don't comment on.

I guess you mean

local NewVarName = subinstr(`var'[1]," ","_",.)

This would work if the entire dataset has been read in as strings and
the intended variable names were in the first observation of every
variable. You then have to -drop- the first observation and
-destring-, or so I guess.

If this were my problem, I would separate the input of the body of the
data and the renaming. So, I would read in from line 9 onwards and
then fix the dopey names in Stata.

Nick

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 11:35 AM, BAIJER Jan 212040 <[email protected]> wrote:

I have a tab delimited text file that I would like to work on using
Stata. This file has a header that I'd like to eliminate; line 9 of
the file contains variable names, lines 10 and further contain the
observations.
>
> I'd like to "transform" my datafile from within Stata, by dropping the first 8 lines, and renaming the variables correctly. There must be a smart way of doing this ?! I could not find out how to get rid of the generic variable names, and instruct Stata to use the information on a given (first) line of the file for variable names.
>
> It so appears (...) that the intended variable names (first observation of each variable) have spaces inthem, so I would probably be looking to try to eliminate those by "subinstr", but I can't get that to work.
>
> I have tried several variants of :
>
> foreach var of varlist _all {
>
>    local NewVarName = subinstr ("`var'[1]'"," ","_")
>
>    ren `var' `NewVarName'
>
> }

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