Creating loop over percentiles with egen

[Gabrielle Penrose]

Dear Statalist,

I am new to Stata and trying to create a loop. I am looking at lifetime earnings, and want to be able to plot and get values for specific quantiles at each age.

Here is the code I have tried:

foreach pct of varlist 10 20 30 50 70 80 {
egen female`pct'=pctile(salary) if female==1 & unigrad==1, p(`pct') by(age)
}

To which Stata returns "invalid name"

Similarly, I am using the user written ado file "rifreg", and would like to run it over the same quantiles again by gender.
Running the following:

qui rifreg income age age2 age3 age4 if age>21 & age<60 & female==1 & unigrad==1, quantile(.10)
predict fem10
qui rifreg income age age2 age3 age4 if age>21 & age<60 & female==1 & unigrad==1, quantile(.20)
predict fem20

ect. has worked, but I would like to loop it also to save time.
I have tried the following to the same error message:

foreach pct of varlist 10 20 30 50 70 80 {
qui rifreg income age age2 age3 age4 if age>21 & age<60 & female==1 & unigrad==1, quantile(`pct')
predict fem`pct'
}

Best,
Gabrielle

[Nick Cox]

In this code

foreach pct of varlist 10 20 30 50 70 80 {
     egen female`pct'=pctile(salary) if female==1 & unigrad==1, p(`pct') by(age)
}

the problem is that 10 20 30 50 70 80 is not a varlist, meaning a list of existing variable names. It's not a list of legal new variable names either. Hence Stata is choking as soon as it sees the 10 , which is not a valid name.

foreach pct in 10 20 30 50 70 80 {

should work.

[Gabrielle Penrose]

Thank you very much Nick!