Creating a new variable if another variable has a string character

[Van Ha]

Hi All:

I want to create a new variable that is yes/no based on whether another variable contains a string variable. Thank you in advance!

So for example,
newvar1 aspirin
1 notSpecified
0 .
1 treatmentAsprinLT75
1 treatmentAspirin
1 treatmentAspirinGT200
0
etc.

[Hemanshu Kumar]

I'm not sure I understand. Could you post a data extract using the dataex command?

Here is one solution, but I don't know if this reflects your setup and what you need:

clear
input byte newvar1 str30 aspirin
1 "notSpecified"
0 "."
1 "treatmentAsprinLT75"
1 "treatmentAspirin"
1 "treatmentAspirinGT200"
0 "."
end

gen byte newvar2 = aspirin != "."

. li, noobs sep(0)

  +-------------------------------------------+
  | newvar1                 aspirin   newvar2 |
  |-------------------------------------------|
  |       1            notSpecified         1 |
  |       0                       .         0 |
  |       1     treatmentAsprinLT75         1 |
  |       1        treatmentAspirin         1 |
  |       1   treatmentAspirinGT200         1 |
  |       0                       .         0 |
  +-------------------------------------------+

[Van Ha]

Hi Kumar:
So my data looks something like the following. I want to create a new variable called "newvar1" where the data is coded yes if there is any sort of data in "treatmentaspirinmasterwhich_base" and no if there is nothing...

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input long id str59 treatmentaspirinmasterwhich_base
255 "notSpecified"                     
259 "treatmentAsprinLT75"                     
260 ""                     
261 "treatmentAspirin"                     
262 "treatmentAspirin75200"
end

[Hemanshu Kumar]

So you just need

label define YESNO 0 "No" 1 "Yes"
gen byte newvar1:YESNO = (treatmentaspirinmasterwhich_base != "")

[Van Ha]

Ohhhh thank you, that makes sense