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#LABEL DEFINE STATA HOW TO#
You'll learn how to stretch this one-observation-at-a-time paradigm in Data Wrangling in Stata, but tasks that break it (like calculating means) require a different approach that we'll talk about soon. Internally, Stata executed a loop: it calculated price*4 for the first observation and stored the result in price2020 for the first observation, then calculated price*4 for the second observation and stored the result in price2020 for the second observation, and so forth for all the observations in the data set. This is a good example of how to check your work: compare what you got to what you expected, and if they don't match make sure you know why! The prices are still generally lower than you'd see at a car dealership, but that's probably because today's cars are much nicer than 1978 cars.
#LABEL DEFINE STATA CODE#
The code will be:Īdd this line to your do file, run it, and examine the results with: To do so you need to multiply the prices by a conversion factor which is the Consumer Price Index in 2020 divided by the Consumer Price Index in 1978, or about 4. The prices in the auto data set are in 1978 dollars, so it might be useful to convert them to 2020 dollars. It's especially important to use do files when you change your data, so start by creating a do file that loads the auto data set: Usually this is exactly what you'd expect and want. If the expression depends on a missing value at any point, the result is missing. You can explore what functions are available by typing help functions.
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Expressions can be as simple as a single number or involve all sorts of complicated functions. Where variable is the name of the variable you want to create or change, and expression is the mathematical expression whose result you want to put in it. gen creates new variables replace changes the values of existing variables. The primary commands for creating and changing variables are generate (usually abbreviated gen) and replace (which, like other commands that can destroy information, has no abbreviation). This article will teach you the basics of making new variables, modifying existing variables, and creating labels. If you're new to Stata we highly recommend starting from the beginning. To conclude, using can invoke the program check_labels as follows.This is part six of Introduction to Stata. Quietly sum `varlist' if `varlist' = "`label'": `: value label `varlist'' ,nomeanĭi in red " `label' isn't present on labels of var `varlist' "ĭi in red " `label' is present on labels of var `varlist' " After we can storage into a scalar called present a value of 1 when the the string was present and 0 if it wasn’t.
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We will get a 7 when it’s not present and a 0 when the label is actually present storage in _rc. Syntax varlist(max=1), label(string) is declaring that the program will just allows one variable and one mandatory option called label() that is going to be read as a string by the program.Īfter, we use quietly sum calling the options from syntax in the same fashion as the first example, and adding the option ,nomean to speed up the process because it won’t compute the variance (probably a better name could be novariance tho).įinally, we use confirm to check if the value was or nor present into the label. The following program ( check_labels) will check if the string that we type on the option, label() is present or not in the labels of a variable.
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We will use a combination of summarize, capture and confirm. Now let’s write a program that can check the existence of a string among the labels of a variable for us.
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