Creating a loop to check for data points

[Van Ha]

Hi: I'm new to creating loops in Stata and hoping that someone can help. I want to create a new variable with yes/no, where it is yes for that patient if one of the other 7 variables in the dataset contains the term "CBC" for that patient. Thanks!

[Daniel Schaefer]

You don't need to do any looping to accomplish this. You use a technique called "vectorization" which allows you to preform operations on an entire vector at once. This technique is common to all statistical programing languages. If you provide a data example using the -dataex- command and post it here I will show you what you need to do. Don't worry, -dataex- is very easy to use.

[Nick Cox]

gen wanted = inlist("CBC", var1, var2, var3, var4, var5, var6, var7)

or some variation depending on what "contains" means precisely.

[Van Ha]

Okay, so this is what my data looks like:

input str14 newv1 str28(newv2 newv3 newv4 newv5)
"BUN" "CBC" "" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "CBC" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "" "" "CBC"
"CBC" "TAK" "" "" ""

[Nick Cox]

clear 
input str14 newv1 str28(newv2 newv3 newv4 newv5)
"BUN" "CBC" "" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "CBC" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "" "" ""
"BUN" "TAK" "" "" "CBC"
"CBC" "TAK" "" "" ""
end 

gen wanted = inlist("CBC", newv1, newv2, newv3, newv4, newv5)

list wanted new* 

     +------------------------------------------------+
     | wanted   newv1   newv2   newv3   newv4   newv5 |
     |------------------------------------------------|
  1. |      1     BUN     CBC                         |
  2. |      1     BUN     TAK     CBC                 |
  3. |      0     BUN     TAK                         |
  4. |      1     BUN     TAK                     CBC |
  5. |      1     CBC     TAK                         |
     +------------------------------------------------+

[Daniel Schaefer]

Thanks Van, looks like you may have made this example data by hand? That's definitely doing things the hard way. Regardless, Nick's code should be sufficient to answer your question. One could edit it to match your example data like so:

gen wanted = inlist("CBC", newv1, newv2, newv3, newv4, newv5)

[Van Ha]

Thank you to both of you! STATA came back saying "inlist not found"

[Van Ha]

Oh nevermind, got it! Thanks again!

[Nick Cox]

The code you used would show the reason for your error message, which would help other people. My guess is that first you left a space after inlist.