Adaptation of Bysort command

[William Bradley]

Hello all,

Is it possible in Stata to operate on only a certain subgroup of your data set while only sorting on one specific variable? By this I mean something along the lines of:

by var1 var2 var3, sort(var4): gen wanted= var1/var2

Those someone know if this is possible?

[Clyde Schechter]

No. Stata needs to have var1, var2, and var3 sorted in order to efficiently create groups defined by them.

If you want to preserve the original sort order of your data after a -by- command, you probably have to do something like -gen long sort_order = _n- before and then -sort sort_order- after.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Further to Clyde's helpful response, the use case you show doesn't need sorting or by-group processing at all. Simply do:

gen wanted = var1/var2

[William Bradley]

Alright thank you Clyde for your response