Skip commands in a loop

[Varsha Vaishnav]

Hello,

I'm running the following loop:

cd "..."
forval i = 1(1)742 {
    capture noisily import delimited `i'.txt, delimiter(space) clear
    rename (v1 v2 v3 v4 v5) (year month place dist state)
    save `i', replace    
}

Some numbers are missing in the range [1,742]. How can I tell stata to ignore the remaining commands when the first one is not working?

[Hemanshu Kumar]

See

help continue

[Nick Cox]

You can use various commands to get a list of wanted files and loop over that. Or you can check whether each file exists within the loop.

  capture confirm file `i'.txt

and make the rest of the code conditional on

if _rc == 0 { 

}

[Varsha Vaishnav]

Thank you, Hemanshu and Nick.