Selecting the first variable without knowing it's name

[Falco Wolf]

Hello all,

I'm doing some big data cleaning for a lot of excel files, and I'm trying to figure out how can I get stata to select the first variable without me specifying it's "variable name", so that I can loop it.

Is there a way to do this?

[daniel klein]

One way

sysuse auto , clear
unab varlist : * 
gettoken varname1 : varlist
di "`varname1'"

and another, using Mata

sysuse auto , clear
mata : st_local("varname1", st_varname(1))
display "`varname1'"

Best
Daniel