Generate new variable using if command

[Wouter de Waart]

Dear all,

I'm trying to solve something that seems rather easy but just doesn't work out. I hope one of you can help me out:

I'm using a dataset on cars in Belgium. Apart from sales, brands and car-characteristics, one column lists the "origin".
For the brand "alpharomeo" the variable org = "Italy", for the brand "peugot", org="France" and so on.

Now I want to create a variable for all cars of European origin.

I tried the command:

gen EU = (org == "Italy" "France" "Germany" "UK" "Sweden" "Spain" "EasternEurope")

[The names of the countries are in red, not sure whether this is supposed to be or not.]

but got the error: "type mismatch".


I then found a forum that dealt with a related question and tried:

gen newvar=""
(298 missing values generated)

replace newvar="EU" if org=="Italy" "France" "Germany" "UK" "Sweden" "Spain" "EasternEurope"

But got the error: "EU" not found



What am I doing wrong?

Kind regards,
Wouter

[Nick Cox]

Perhaps you should cite the forum you tried; on this evidence it's guilty of spectacularly bad advice and should be shunned.

See help for inlist().

gen newvar = "EU" if inlist(org, "Italy","France","Germany","UK", "Sweden","Spain","EasternEurope")

[Matt Warkentin]

Edit: See Nick's solution above. The code is cleaner than mine.

[Ebru Aricioglu]

Dear all,
In the dataset that I worked on, there is a variable named rta, rta includes goods, goods, and services, and services. I want to create a new variable that includes only goods, and another variable that includes goods and services from rta variable. How can I do it?
Kind regards
Ebru