Misc Collection of Stata Utilities

This is a collection of miscellaneous Stata snippets that I use across several of my projects.

version 0.1 24Nov2018

Installation

Since misc is a generic name, the package installed will be called mcmisc (mc for my initials):

local github "https://raw.githubusercontent.com"
net install mcmisc, from(`github'/mcaceresb/stata-misc/master)
* adoupdate, update
* ado uninstall mcmisc

Except for genfly, all files require at least Stata 13 (but they will likely work in earlier versions as they are not terribly esoteric). genfly uses the improved regular expressions engine that was introduced in version 14, so it will only work in Stata 14 and later.

Included

• bench (benchmark): Time or benchmark stata programs.
• genfly: Generate variables on the fly.
• head and tail: Output the first or last observations of a dataset.
• switchcase: Switch the case style of variables (mixed, camel, snake, etc.)
• timestamp: Print time stamp and basic data info (name, size, shape) to log.
• todatetime: Convert strings to date-time.

Usage

* Timestamp
* ---------

clear
timestamp
set seed 1729
set obs 1000
timestamp

* Generate data
* -------------

gen x1 = runiform()
gen x2 = rnormal()
gen x3 = runiform() * 10
gen x4 = rnormal()
gen y  = 1 + x1 - x2 + 2 * (x3 <= 5) - 3 / x4 + rnormal() * 2
gen var1 = int(100 * runiform())
gen var2 = int(100 * runiform())

* Heads and tails
* ---------------

head
tail
head 7 x?
tail 12 var* if mod(_n, 4)

* Genfly
* ------

genfly: tab {s1: var1<=60} {s2: var2<=70}
genfly: tab {{s3 "Log v1 * 10": log(var1 * 10)}<=60} {var2<=70}
genfly: reg y x1 x2 {x3<=5} {x5 "Inverse of x4": 1/x4}
desc

* Switchcase
* ----------

clear
set obs 1
gen foo_bar_long_version = 1
gen foo_bar = 1
gen m_foo_b_ = 1
foreach what in camel snake mixed toggle toggle lower upper {
    switchcase `what'
    ds, varwidth(32)
}

* Benchmark
* ---------

sysuse auto, clear
bench, reps(10) trace last: reg price mpg
return list
bench, reps(5) restore last: gen x = 1
ds x

* Todatetime
* ----------

sysuse gnp96, clear
tostring date, format(%td_NN/DD/CCYY) gen(datestr) force
todatetime datestr, gen(dateback) datefmt(MDY)
assert date == dateback

License

stata-misc is MIT-licensed