Generate new variable if the string value of an existing variable is in a list

[Craig Yang]

Dear All,

I have a dataset contains Country variable, with country names as string values. I've been trying to generate a region variable, here's what I tried:

gen Region = " "

bysort Country Year: replace Region = "South America" if Country == "Argentina" | Country == "Brazil" | Country == "Peru"...

I'm wondering if there's are easier way, say generate Region = "South America" if Country is inlist(Argentina, Brazil, Peru...), so that I don't have to type "Country ==" part many times?

Any help is appreciated!

Thank you!

Best,
Craig

[Nick Cox]

The bysort prefix does no harm but is not needed. You can go

replace Region = "South America" if inlist(Country, "Argentina", "Brazil", "Peru")

but inlist() has small limits on the number of string arguments which bite easily. A more principled approach is to set up a small dataset with the equivalences and then merge. More at https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/d...s-for-subsets/

[Craig Yang]

Thank you, Nick! Both your code and the link are very helpful!