RE: st: renaming variables based on long labels

["Cohen, Elan" <cohened@upmc.edu>]

Nick,

My -su- example was simply meant to illustrate that Stata _does_ have machinery for recognizing unique variable names, or at least unique combinations of characters.  Here's another example.

local pre somethinglong
g `pre'abcd = 0
g `pre'abdd = 0
su `pre'*
* The variables display as:
something~cd
something~dd

g `pre'aacd = 0
su `pre'*
* The variables display as:
somethin~bcd
something~dd
somethin~acd

Somehow Stata knows to abbreviate the variables differently based on the other relevant variables.  I'm imagining I could apply this same machinery to -rename- (obviously replacing '~' with say '_').  I can't view the source code for -summarize- so I'm not sure how Stata does this.

Does anyone know of another command that does something similar with source code available?

Thanks,

- Elan


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-
> statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
> Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2011 10:37
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: Re: st: renaming variables based on long labels
> 
> You are confusing quite different facts.
> 
> In your code, -renvars- (SJ) is adding the prefix "longprefix" to the
> variable names in the -bg2- dataset. But it so happens that all the
> variable names so created remain legal. The longest is just 18
> characters long so the upper limit of 32 is not biting at all.
> 
> However, the names are long enough for Stata's abbreviation machinery
> to be used when you call -summarize-, but this is not a matter of
> changing the variable names, and in any case the character ~ is not
> allowed within variable names.
> 
> I imagine your problem is perfectly soluble, but will require more ad
> hoc code from you. Example:
> 
> foreach var of varlist VAR* {
>         local label `=strtoname("`:var lab `var''")
>         local label : subinstr local label "Relationship" "Reln", all
>         local label : subinstr local label "Democrat" "D", all
>         ....
> }
> 
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Cohen, Elan <cohened@upmc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I have a dataset with variable names VAR1-VAR40.  All variables have
> (pretty long) labels.  I'm using
> >
> > foreach var of varlist VAR* {
> >        rename `var' `=strtoname("`:var lab `var''")'
> > }
> >
> > to rename each variable according to their label.  I'm running into a
> problem because the variable labels are not unique within the first 32
> characters and so I'm getting "Relationship_of_interviewee_to_s already
> defined".
> >
> > Can Stata automatically generate a unique name based on existing variables?
>  This seems like it's possible based on the following output:
> >
> > webuse bg2
> > renvars, prefix(longprefix)
> > su
> >
> > where Stata truncates variables names and automatically finds a unique
> string to display for each variable (-findit renvars-).
> >
> 
> *
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