Re: st: nested loop with string values

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You don't explain what "not working" means precisely. I have an
unpublished list of about 20 senses in which this phrase or one
similar has been used on Statalist, just three of which are syntax
error, not converging and giving results that are incorrect.

Both your loops are in terms of an index i. You refer to an index j
which is never defined. That is not illegal, but Stata will just
substitute a blank. I guess at a typo, but as both inner loop and
outer loop refer to j, there is likely to be a logic error there too.

Your problem may call for a -reshape long-, not the creation of more
variables, but I don't understand your data structure at all. Perhaps
you should give us an example of your data, explaining what is to be
an observation. For example, are individual observations people and
values present only if the person is in a particular age group or
income group? In that case, one of the row functions in -egen- may
help.
Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 17 December 2013 07:45, Claudia Rangel <clrangel@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Stata list members
>
> apologies for the newbie question, but I have spent two days reading
> and my first attempt at a nested loop is still not working.
>
> I have a long list of variables  (i.e. ecymacnia13 ecymacnib13
> ecymacnic13 ecymadnia13 ecymadnib13 ecymadnic13), which basically
> identify age groups "a b...f" and income groups "a b c...j".
>
> I am trying to generate one variable holding the income values
> according to the age group for each observation on the dataset (in
> variable ageflgecy: a (<34) b (35-54) c(45-64)...), and hopefully
> reducing the  5 X 10 variables to just 10 income variables.
>
> I was able to create a similar loop but the variable names contain
> numbers instead of strings for the age and income groups.
>
> This is one of my latest attempts:
>
>
> tokenize "a b c d e f g h i j"
> forval i =1/10  {
> gen ecymani``j''13 =.
> forval i =1/6{
> replace ecymani``j''13 = ecyma`i'ni`j'13 if ageflgecy ==`i'
>           }
> }
>
>
> Thanks for any suggestion.
> Claudia
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