Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
| From | Barry Quinn <b.quinn@qub.ac.uk> |
| To | "statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu" <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
| Subject | RE: st: Unique identifier from a string name |
| Date | Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:10:00 +0000 |
Thanks for all the suggestions. The context of the problem is to build a panel from yearly data using firm names as the unique id with the -merge- command. Nick/Daniel: I had thought of -encode- and -egen-'s-group()- but my panel is unbalanced and I presume both of these are based on an alphabetical sort order? Brendan: I think your solutions may prove more useful although am not sure how to turn it into an id to use with -merge- best Barry Quinn * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/