Re: st: Batch renaming variables

[David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net>]

At 09:36 AM 10/18/2012, Wameq Raza wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I'm having some trouble trying to figure out how to do batch renames.
> To elaborate, suppose I have 10 variables: v1, v2....v10 and I want to
> rename every second var (ie v2, v4, v6, v8 and v10) to cost_a,
> cost_b....cost_e. Can anyone please help me figure this out? I've
> tried looking into renvars, but can't seem to figure it out.

If there are only five renames, I would just write them out.
But if you want a programmatic solution (as maybe there are really 
many more renames)...
(untested)

local suffixes "a b c d e"

forvalues jj = 1/5 {
        ren v`=`jj'*2' cost_`=word("`suffixes'", `jj')'
}

----
Another way of getting the suffixes (a, b, c,...) is to use
char(96+ `jj')
but you need to be careful not to exceed jj=26.
But that's true in any case.

HTH
--David

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