Recognizing Texts Observations

[Mohammed Khaled]

Dear All,

I have an issue with making STATA to recognize txt observations.

I have a table that looks like the below one and I am required to generate the column Same if the person have similar choice under column mobile and laptop.

PersonID	Mobile	Laptop	Same
4896	Apple	Apple	1
5163	Apple	Dell	0

I used the following commands:

gen Same=.

. replace Same==1 if( Mobile == Laptop)

But STATA reported the below error:

== invalid name


Any advices? your help will be so appreciated

Regards,

Mohammed Khaled

[Øyvind Snilsberg]

replace Same = 1 if Mobile == Laptop

[Mohammed Khaled]

Thanks Øyvind Snilsberg !!

[Mohammed Khaled]

Dear All,

I followed the following codes:

encode Mobile, gen(Mobile2)
encode Laptop, gen(Laptop2)
gen Same=.
replace Same = 1 if ( Mobile2 == Laptop2 )
replace Same = 0 if ( Same== . )


It worked well and then I realized that some data are missing and I had to extract the data again and repeat the steps but it's not working anymore, can anyone tell me what might went wrong?

Your assistance will be so appreciated

[Øyvind Snilsberg]

at what step did it stop working and what error message did Stata give?

[Mohammed Khaled]

It gave me "Invalid name"

But I figured out that I needed to trim the data for extra spaces and then it worked.

Thanks Øyvind Snilsberg for your support and following up with me, it's truly appreciated.