Changing names of variables using the values of another variable

Question

I am trying to rename around 100 dummy variables with the values from a separate variable.

I have a variable products, which stores information on what products a company sells and have generated a dummy variable for each product using:

tab products, gen(productid)

However, the variables are named productid1, productid2 and so on. I would like these variables to take the values of the variable products instead.

Is there a way to do this in Stata without renaming each variable individually?

Edit:

Here is an example of the data that will be used. There will be duplications in the product column.

And then I have run the tab command to create a dummy variable for each product to produce the following table.

sort product
tab product, gen(productid)

I noticed it updates the labels to show what each variable represents.

What I would like to do is to assign the value to be the name of the variable such as commercial to replace productid1 and so on.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-05 22:04:04Z

Using your example data:

clear

input companyid str10 product
1 "P2P"
2 "Retail"
3 "Commercial"
4 "CreditCard"
5 "CreditCard"
6 "EMFunds"
end

tabulate product, generate(productid)
list, abbreviate(10)

sort product
levelsof product, local(new) clean
tokenize `new'

ds productid*

local i 0
foreach var of varlist `r(varlist)' {
    local ++i
    rename `var' ``i''      
}

Produces the desired output:

list, abbreviate(10)

     +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
     | companyid      product   Commercial   CreditCard   EMFunds   P2P   Retail |
     |---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  1. |         3   Commercial            1            0         0     0        0 |
  2. |         5   CreditCard            0            1         0     0        0 |
  3. |         4   CreditCard            0            1         0     0        0 |
  4. |         6      EMFunds            0            0         1     0        0 |
  5. |         1          P2P            0            0         0     1        0 |
  6. |         2       Retail            0            0         0     0        1 |
     +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Nick Cox · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-05 17:14:49Z

Arbitrary strings might not be legal Stata variable names. This will happen if they (a) are too long; (b) start with any character other than a letter or an underscore; (c) contain characters other than letters, numeric digits and underscores; or (d) are identical to existing variable names. You might be better off making the strings into variable labels, where only an 80 character limit bites.

This code loops over the variables and does its best:

gen long obs = _n 

foreach v of var productid? productid?? productid??? {
     su obs if `v' == 1, meanonly 
     local tryit = product[r(min)] 
     capture rename `v' `=strtoname("`tryit'")' 
}

Note: code not tested.

EDIT: Here is a test. I added code for variable labels. The data example and code show that repeated values and values that could not be variable names are accommodated.

clear

input str13 products
"one"
"two"
"one" 
"three"
"four"
"five"
"six something" 
end

tab products, gen(productsid) 

gen long obs = _n 

foreach v of var productsid*{
     su obs if `v' == 1, meanonly 
     local value = products[r(min)] 
     local tryit = strtoname("`value'") 
     capture rename `v' `tryit' 
     if _rc == 0 capture label var `tryit' "`value'" 
     else label var `v' "`value'" 
} 

drop obs 

describe 

Contains data
  obs:             7                          
 vars:             7                          
 size:           133                          
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
products        str13   %13s                  
five            byte    %8.0g                 five
four            byte    %8.0g                 four
one             byte    %8.0g                 one
six_something   byte    %8.0g                 six something
three           byte    %8.0g                 three
two             byte    %8.0g                 two
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yan Song · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-14 14:01:28Z

0

Another solution is to use the extended macro function

local varlabel：variable label

The tested code is:

clear
input companyid str10 product
1 "P2P"
2 "Retail"
3 "Commercial"
4 "CreditCard"
5 "CreditCard"
6 "EMFunds"
end

tab product, gen(product_id)

* get the list of product id variables
ds product_id*

* loop through the product id variables and change the 
variable name to its label
foreach var of varlist `r(varlist)' {
local varlabel: variable label `var'
display "`varlabel'"
local pos = strpos("`varlabel'","==")+2
local varlabel = substr("`varlabel'",`pos',.)
display "`varlabel'"
rename `var' `varlabel'
}

answered Oct 14, 2018 at 14:01

Yan Song

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