How to keep specific rows based on a list of strings

[Louise Jensen]

Hello

I am currently in a dataset with a country variable containing all countries in the world since 1960. The problem is, that I want to keep only 50 of these countries. I have tried with enlist, but this is limited to only 10 strings. So currently I am stuck. I need it to be a code which can be used on 2 other datasets with the exact same problem, and I don't want to manually delete possible 15000 rows.

Do any of you have an idea to for instance keep if country == (the list below with country names)

Angola

Burundi

Benin

Burkina Faso

Botswana

Central African Republic

Côte d'Ivoire

Cameroon

D.R. of the Congo

Congo

Comoros

Cabo Verde

Djibouti

Algeria

Egypt

Ethiopia

Gabon

Ghana

Guinea

Gambia

Guinea-Bissau

Equatorial Guinea

Kenya

Liberia

Lesotho

Morocco

Madagascar

Mali

Mozambique

Mauritania

Mauritius

Malawi

Namibia

Niger

Nigeria

Rwanda

Sudan

Senegal

Sierra Leone

Sao Tome and Principe

Eswatini

Seychelles

Chad

Togo

Tunisia

U.R. of Tanzania: Mainland

Uganda

South Africa

Zambia

Zimbabwe

Best regards Louise

[Joro Kolev]

Create a dataset with these names, then merge it to the big dataset, and then keep if _merge==3.

[Ken Chui]

Just to add, the current list may need to be tidied up. For example United Republic of Tanzania and Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. were broken into two rows and can cause data merging error.

And as a reminder, when you create this data set, make sure the country in this data and the country in the long data are of the same data type. For instance, if one is a character-based string variable, and one is numeric variable with labels, then the merging would not work.

[Sascha-Christopher Geschke]

local countries Angola Burundi Benin Burkina Faso Botswana Central African Republic Cameroon Congo Congo Comoros Cabo Verde Djibouti Algeria Egypt Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Guinea Gambia Guinea-Bissau
disp "`countries'"

gen tokeep = .
local n : word count `countries'
forvalues i = 1(1)`n' {
local str = word("`countries'", `i')
replace tokeep = 1 if country=="`str'"
}

keep if tokeep==1
cap drop tokeep