Problem merging regions with mergepoly

[Juan Jung]

Hello everybody. I am trying to use mergepoly to merge some regions, as I have regional data for Europe but in some countries it is NUTS1 dissagregation and in others is NUTS2.

I am trying like this:

mergepoly if inlist(_ID,"222","233") using "nuts2_shp.dta", coor("new_coor.dta")

That is, trying to merge regions identified as 222 and 233 in my dataset

However, I get this reply: type mismatch r(109);

Not sure how to proceed. Can anybody help me? (Perhaps Robert Picard can help me if available!)

Thanks

[Nate Tillern]

Hi Juan. I unfortunately can not help with getting this done in Stata. However, I have done all of my work involving shapefile manipulation in the free software Qgis which allows you to do shapefile editing by hand, visually, which I have found quite useful. Then of course shapefiles can be exported from Qgis and read into Stata and other software.

[Jared Greathouse]

As someone who's used mergepoly, look at what Picard does here and adapt it to your example. As the saying might go, "One does not simply use mergepoly."

Follow the instructions EXACTLY, and it'll work out assuming you've set everything up properly. If it helps, I'll even present my code which does just that in a current project I'm doing.

[Juan Jung]

Hi Juan. I unfortunately can not help with getting this done in Stata. However, I have done all of my work involving shapefile manipulation in the free software Qgis which allows you to do shapefile editing by hand, visually, which I have found quite useful. Then of course shapefiles can be exported from Qgis and read into Stata and other software.

Thanks, Nate Tillern for suggesting Qgis, its fantastic!