Counting with foreach

[Julius Bruening]

Hello,

I am working with a survey and i have several yes/no question. My goal is to count for each person how many questions he answered with yes (1).

Due to the high amount of questions I was thinking about using a loop, in this case a "foreach" loop sounds most fitting. But I am not quite sure.

Is this the best way of doing it, is there any other way?

Secondly I have tried something but I keep getting "invalid syntax" errors...
(pp24-pp72 is the list of variables I am working with)

foreach x for varlist pp24-pp72 {
count if `x' == 1
}

I think there is something major, that I am missing.
Does anybody can give me some adive on how to move forward

Btw i am using Stata 17.0

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Julius:
welcome to this forum.
As far as your second question is concerned, you may want to try:

foreach x of varlist pp24-pp72 {
count if  `x'== 1
}

like in the following toy-example:

. use "C:\Program Files\Stata17\ado\base\a\auto.dta"
(1978 automobile data)

. foreach x of varlist rep78-foreign {
  2. count if  `x'== 1
  3. }
  2
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  22

.

[Julius Bruening]

Thank you very much!

[Nick Cox]

See countvalues from SSC. https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...lable-from-ssc

clear 
set obs 1000 

forval j = 24/72 { 
    gen pp`j' = runiform() > 0.`j' 
} 

countvalues pp24-pp72, values(1) 

  +------------+
  | name     1 |
  |------------|
  | pp24   748 |
  | pp25   778 |
  | pp26   779 |
  | pp27   702 |
  | pp28   714 |
  | pp29   732 |
  | pp30   692 |
  | pp31   683 |
  | pp32   697 |
  | pp33   661 |
  | pp34   680 |
  | pp35   666 |
  | pp36   628 |
  | pp37   634 |
  | pp38   624 |
  | pp39   576 |
  | pp40   606 |
  | pp41   596 |
  | pp42   599 |
  | pp43   557 |
  | pp44   532 |
  | pp45   526 |
  | pp46   558 |
  | pp47   542 |
  | pp48   514 |
  | pp49   539 |
  | pp50   501 |
  | pp51   486 |
  | pp52   501 |
  | pp53   464 |
  | pp54   477 |
  | pp55   459 |
  | pp56   417 |
  | pp57   422 |
  | pp58   378 |
  | pp59   436 |
  | pp60   364 |
  | pp61   397 |
  | pp62   364 |
  | pp63   375 |
  | pp64   363 |
  | pp65   345 |
  | pp66   356 |
  | pp67   325 |
  | pp68   310 |
  | pp69   316 |
  | pp70   295 |
  | pp71   293 |
  | pp72   314 |
  +------------+

.