Restore orginal order variables

[Mariska Snel]

Dear Statalisters,

As I am working on a quite large database, I am changing the names of the variables and also their order often because I need to clean the file. But once I'm done with cleaning, I would like to restore the original order of the database.

I can click on all the variables to order them by hand, but as there are a lot of variables this is time-consuming. I read the files about 'order', but I could not find a command which can restore the order to the basic lay out when opening the document. Does any of you guys have a good alternative?

Thanks in advance,
Mariska

[daniel klein]

A basic approach could be

/*
    put all variables in their 
    original order in local -allnames-
*/
unab allnames : *

...here goes your code

/*
    restore the original order 
*/
order `all'

Since you are changing variable names and might even drop some variables or create new ones, you need to update the name in local allnames. For example

rename foo bar
local allnames : subinstr local allnames " foo " " bar "

Best
Daniel

[Nick Cox]

You can restore the original order easily if you save it at the outset.

 
unab original : *

should put the variable names in a local macro. After a lot of cleaning

 
order `original'

should put back the original order. That should work even if you have created new variables; any such just being put after the original variables.

You could also do some variant on this even if you never put those variable names in a macro:

 
save current 
use original 
unab original : * 
use current 
order `original' 
save original, replace

With a really big dataset that's a lot of heaving around. It's also programmable in principle just to read in the names by looking at the original .dta, but I could not write down the code for you; that may have been done already.

See also reorder from SSC. I've not used or even looked at that since I wrote it, and it doesn't do directly what you ask, but it's in similar terrritory.

[Mariska Snel]

Dear Daniel and Nick,

Thank you for your advice, it's an excellent code; happy with it !

Best,
Mariska