Maximum of indexed variables

[Mario Sum]

Dear users,

I would like to please ask for your help concerning the following issue.

I would like to create a variable which contains the maximum of n variables, called x1, x2, ..., xn.
E.g., let n=3. Then, I would like to have

gen max = max(x1, x2, x3)

Could you please aid me in referencing to x1 up to xn? Like in max = max(of x1-x3).
Alternatively, I would highly appreciate if you could help me how to solve my problem in another way.

Yours sincerely,
Mario

[Mike Lacy]

If you'd explain what you don't understand in -help max()- , that would help us understand your problem. Also, you don't tell us what your problem is in referencing x1 to xn. I also am wondering if you want a different max for each observation. Finally, I'll make a wild guess that you might want to know in which particular variable the maximum occurred. What I suspect you want is easy to do; the hard part for me here is figuring out what you want.

[Mario Sum]

Hello

and thank you for your kind, quick reply.

Your wild guess is not correct and even revisiting the help file makes me wonder where it might originate from.
Although I rested assured my problem being entirely clear, I will add a picture.

So (I would like to write “of course“) I want a maximum for each different observation.
The problem is that realiter I do not have n=3 but n>100. In fact, n is not fixed. Thus, it were prohibitive respectively infeasible to type out “max(x1, x2, …, xn)”. As the guidelines demand, my example was a minimal example.
The problem posed now is that I cannot use max(x1-xn) and to be sure, let n=100, max(x1-x100). To be even surer, this would imply to have additional 97 columns in the above picture.

Yours sincerely,
Mario

[Rich Goldstein]

you do not want -gen- and you do not want the max function; you want

egen max=rowmax(x1-x100)

but note that this assumes these are contiguous; you could substitute "x*" if you want to include all variables which have variable names starting with "x"; see

help egen

[Mario Sum]

Exactly! Thank you very much, indeed!

I noticed that I still have to keep this in mind.