Re: st: recode foreach with sysmis versus dot

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

See also -mvdecode- and -mvencode-.

Nick

On 24 Dec 2012, at 12:53, annoporci <annoporci@gmail.com> wrote:

> My question here is pure curiosity as I have found a workaround. No  
> urgency.
> In a dataset I have, I need to replace zeros with "missing" for all  
> variables in the dataset.
> A recent statalist exchange suggested the use of recode with a  
> foreach loop. That suggestion was to turn a missing value into zeros  
> --- the reverse of what I'm after --- so I tried to adapt the  
> suggestion:
> recode myvar (mis = 0)
>
> The reverse:
>
> recode myvar (0 = mis)
>
> But that and other similar attempts failed. The "dot" sysmiss  
> approach worked, so that's what I'm using now:
> recode myvar (0 = .)
>
> <CODE>
> use auto,clear
> local variables rep78
> foreach var of varlist `variables'{
> *   recode `var'(3=mis) /// fails
> *   recode `var'(3=sysmiss) /// fails
> *   recode `var'(3=missing) /// fails
> *   recode `var'(3=`missing') /// fails
> *   recode `var'(3=-9999) /// works
>   recode `var'(3=.) /// works
> }
> <\CODE>
>
> Reference:
> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2010-08/msg00410.html
> http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?missing
>
> --
> Patrick Toche.
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