Re: st: Renaming variables using foreach

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

This is contradictory. If the variable names in some other software
are too long to be handled in Stata, how can they renamed in Stata?
You can't even import them. Conversely, names imported in Stata, while
possibly truncated, do not need to renamed.

The FAQ spells out

The current version of Stata is 12.1. Please specify if you are using
an earlier version; otherwise, the answer to your question is likely
to refer to commands or features unavailable to you.

See also http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2012-05/msg00998.html
for reminders of what else you should know.

Nick

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Suryadipta Roy <sroy2138@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Nick and Steve,
>
> Thank you very much the help! Actually, I forgot to mention that I am
> using Stata 11.2, and what I really wanted to do was to "label" the
> variables with the existing variable names (since the current variable
> names from the World Develepment Indicators are too long). The idea
> was thus to change the long names to var1, var2, etc, and then use
> -label- . I would now check if I can somehow manage to get the
> variables labelled by their variable names (obviously I can do that
> manually as well) in Stata 11.
>
> And, Nick's solution works and will read into it very carefully.
>
> Thanks again!
> Suryadipta.
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Steve Nakoneshny <scnakone@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>> Suryadipta,
>>
>> Your loop fails as you are asking for each variable in your varlist to be renamed var1. Assuming you're using Stata 12, you don't need a loop to solve this issue. You can achieve your desired result (or some reasonable facsimile) using -rename-:
>>
>> rename (Agricultural_raw_materials_expor - Value_lost_due_to_electrical_ou) var#, addnumber
>>
>> See -help rename- for more details.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>> On 2012-06-26, at 3:20 PM, Suryadipta Roy wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Statalisters,
>>>
>>> I am currently learning looping in Stata and is stuck with the
>>> following problem: I have about 150 variables that I want to rename as
>>> var1 var2, etc.. upto var 150. I tried the following:
>>>
>>> local i = `i' + 1
>>> foreach x of varlist  Agricultural_raw_materials_expor -
>>> Value_lost_due_to_electrical_out  {
>>> 2. rename `x' var`i'
>>> 3. }
>>>
>>> I am getting the following error message:
>>> var1 already defined
>>> r(110);
>>>
>>> I find that only the first variable is renamed as "var1" and then the
>>> loop stopped running. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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