Filling in missing observations based on sequence number

[Khat Naing]

Hello,

I am trying to fill in the "town" variable in my dataset, and I cannot think of any Stata code to do it (please refer to the picture I have attached for this question). For all the missings of "town" that come after "ABINGTON" and before "ACTON", I'd like it to say "ABINGTON"; for those after "ACTON" and before the next value, I'd like those to say "ACTON", and so on. Is there a way to do that using the seqnum variable? I hope my question is not too confusing and that the screenshot is helpful. Thanks so much for your advice.

Khat

[Nick Cox]

This is an FAQ

https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/d...issing-values/

replace town = town[_n-1] if missing(town)

Almost certainly you should want to drop these observations

drop if A == TOWN

I'll stop there but you need more work on this dataset. Do please read and act on https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#stata and don't post attachments; post example data.

[Marcos Almeida]

Welcome to the Stata Forum / Statalist,

Please take some time to read the FAQ. There you'll find instructions about the best way to share command/data/output. Indeed, snapshots are not a good resource, for several reasons. Among them, those who are prompt to help you will have the burden to type a toy example before informing you the command.

That said, I believe this will be a safe strategy to your case:

replace town = town[_n-1] if town==""

Edit: crossed with Nick's reply.

[Khat Naing]

Thank you so much for the advice, and I apologize for my mistakes. It's my first year using Stata, and I am still learning. Appreciate all pointers.

Best,

Khat