Suppressing small values

[Kristen McArthur]

Hi all - is there a way to suppress small values in output? I work on a large cohort study and we suppress all values <5 for identifiability reasons. So far we Stata users have been either changing them manually, or exporting results to an excel file, importing that file back in with values as strings, and replacing "1", "2", "3", or "4" as "<5". However, if there is a command or program to run, this would be very helpful! Thanks!

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Kristen:
welcome to this forum.
I'm not sure I got you right, so please consider what follows as a temptative reply:

. set obs 5
Number of observations (_N) was 0, now 5.

. g value=_n

. list

     +-------+
     | value |
     |-------|
  1. |     1 |
  2. |     2 |
  3. |     3 |
  4. |     4 |
  5. |     5 |
     +-------+

. tostring value, g (string_value)
string_value generated as str1

. replace string_value="<5" if value<5
variable string_value was str1 now str2


. list

     +------------------+
     | value   string~e |
     |------------------|
  1. |     1         <5 |
  2. |     2         <5 |
  3. |     3         <5 |
  4. |     4         <5 |
  5. |     5          5 |
     +------------------+

.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

In general, no there is not. Some community-contributed commands may offer this ability (e.g., -basetable- from SSC by Niels Henrik Bruun).

So far we Stata users have been either changing them manually, or exporting results to an excel file, importing that file back in with values as strings, and replacing "1", "2", "3", or "4" as "<5".

This may be able to be achieved using programming, depending on the specifics on what the output is, and how you ultimately need to export it.