Re: st: how to access Stata's record of the variable data is sorted on

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Thanks!

I cannot get it working in Mata though. st_local(":sorted by") returns
an empty string, while the local is accessed fine in Stata. What is
the way around this? (And why does this happen, by the way?)

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Robert Picard <picard@netbox.com> wrote:
> dis "`:sortedby'"
>
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:52 PM, László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> [D] sort documents how Stata keeps track of the variable the data has
>> been sorted on, and you see this information as the last line of the
>> output from -describe-. However, I cannot find a way to access this
>> information and make use of it. Is there any?
>>
>> For those interested, I think I have a legitimate use case when I want
>> to use this. Sorting my data can take a long-long time, even if the
>> variable is categorical. But as I need a -tab- of the categories
>> anyway, I can utilize the frequencies returned to assign a rank for a
>> new sort order for -mf_collate-. This should be much faster. But I
>> would be happy to skip this step completely if the data is already
>> sorted on the variable when my command is invoked.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Laszlo
>> *
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>
> *
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> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

*
*   For searches and help try:
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*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/