Matching pairs of closest locations

[Netane Ben-Porath]

Hello,

I have two CSV files; call them A and B. Each file has a list of names of areas linked to the areas' central coordinates (longitude and latitude). I would like to link each area in file A to the closest area in file B. In addition, I hope to generate a variable that shows the distance between the matched areas' coordinates. How can I achieve this?

Thank you very much.

[Andrew Musau]

ssc install geodist, replace
help geodist

You want to first match each observation in A to all observations in B, calculate the distances using geodist, sort and keep the closest distance. If the files are not big, see

help cross

on forming pairwise combinations. If the files are too large, merge each observation at a time, e.g., using a loop.