Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
From | "Sarah Edgington" <sedging@ucla.edu> |
To | <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: is there a way to determine variable storage type within a dofile |
Date | Fri, 9 Dec 2011 15:52:48 -0800 |
Hello all, Is there a way to get Stata to return the storage type for a variable? I know I can use -describe- to visually see the storage type, but I would like to use the information in an if statement as part of a loop. Basically, I guess I'm looking for something conceptually like the isreal function in Mata. I am working on importing and cleaning some data that began its life as an Excel spreadsheet. I have a series of columns in the original sheet that either have an X in them or are blank and I'm trying to turn these into zero-one indicators in my final dataset. So I'm using -foreach- to loop through the varlist of each of these indicator variables, changing X to 1 and missing to zero, then using -destring- to create the final desired byte variable. The problem is that sometimes a column has no Xs and gets imported as a byte variable (with all observations missing). So when I get to those variables my loop exits due to type mismatch. I can work around this with capture but this is not the first time for this project that I've found myself thinking that I want to do a particular thing just with string variables or just numeric variables. If I were only importing the data once I'd just do it the hard way and make a list of the string variables by hand, but since I'm setting up dofiles to read in new files as we get them, I anticipate that exactly which variables get imported with which storage types will change over time. In general it seems like I might be able construct cleaner and more manageable code if there were some command that would return the storage type for a variable that I could use to create lists of variables of a given type. Or is there some other obvious trick I'm missing that would make constructing this type of code easier? Thanks. -Sarah Edgington * * 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/