Creating a counter with alphabets

[Akib Khan]

Hi there,

We often use a numeric 'counter' in loops. Example code:

local i = 1
foreach .....{
....`i'...
local i = `i' + 1
}

How could I do it using alphabets? That is, I want to go along the sequence 'a b c ....'.

Thanks in advance for your kind response.

[Nick Cox]

foreach x in `c(alpha)' {
    di "`x'"
}

See the output of

creturn list

for other sequences stored in Stata. (Scroll to the end of the output.)

[Akib Khan]

foreach x in `c(alpha)' {
di "`x'"
}

See the output of

creturn list

for other sequences stored in Stata. (Scroll to the end of the output.)

Hi Nick,

Thanks so much. However, I'm not actually looking to loop over them. The relationship isn't one-to-many but one-to-one. To illustrate:

X-1-a
X-2-b
X-3-c
Y-1-a
Y-2-b
Y-3-c

So, I'm essentially looping over {X,Y} and then {1,2,3}, but thereafter want to form a one-to-one relationship b/w {1,2,3} and {a,b,c}; hence, wanted to use an alphabetic 'counter'. Does it make sense? :S

[Nick Cox]

I am reluctant to guess at how to modify concrete code as you don't give any. But schematically this may help:

tokenize "a b c" 
foreach v in X Y { 
      di "`v'" 
      forval j = 1/3 { 
            di "`i'" 
            di "``i'''" 
     }
}

[Maarten Buis]

tokenize `c(alpha)'
forvalues i = 1/26 {
    di "letter `i' is ``i''"
}