how to encode alphabetical variable to numerical

[Saleh sharmah]

Hey all,
I have alphabetical variable that contains letters such as AA, Aa, BB, etc and I want to generate a new variable such as the following:
gen creditrating_var= 1 if credit rating =="AA"|"Aa"|",Ba"
how can I generate a code to accomplish this task?
thanks for your help.

[Ben Fauerbach]

gen creditrating_var = creditrating=="AA" | creditrating=="Aa" | creditrating=="Ba"

Should create a variable that equals 1 if any one of those conditions are satisfied.

[Saleh sharmah]

Thanks Ben for your responce, i used this code and it returns error:
gen S&P_rating=2 if Creditrating=="AA+"| Creditrating=="AA"| Creditrating=="AA-"
& invalid name
r(198);

[Ben Fauerbach]

I think it may be that you're trying to use the "&" character in your variable name. Try using only numbers (0-9), letters (a-z), and underscores(_).

[Saleh sharmah]

Thank you so much Ben, it worked well.

[Ben Fauerbach]

No problem, glad it worked!

[Saleh sharmah]

HEY Ben
I am trying to calculate the standard deviation for 14 variables ( Q1, Q2 to Q14) and I use this command:
egen CFV_STD=sd inrange(Q1:Q14) but it is not working.
would you by any chance know the correct code in this case?

many thanks

[Hemanshu Kumar]

If you are looking to compute the standard deviation of the 14 values that occur in a single row (observation) of the dataset, then you need

egen CFV_STD = rowsd(Q1-Q14)

You might also want to take a look at

help inrange()

to see what that function does and the correct syntax to use it.

[Saleh sharmah]

Thanks Hemanshu for your help.