How can I display the top five observations (by frequency) in a table?

[Danah Abdul]

Hello,
I am trying to look at the top five recorded diagnoses (numerically coded) in a very large dataset. But given that the dataset is so large, when I type this command

tab diagnosiscode, sort

I get a very long table and I cannot scroll to the top of the table to see the most frequent diagnoses.

I tried typing

tab diagnosiscode in 1/5, sort

but I get an error message

varlist required

May you help me please. How can I view the five most frequent diagnosis in a very large dataset?

[Nick Cox]

See groups from the Stata Journal.

A 2017 post here about groups being updated on SSC has an example that does exactly that.

[William Lisowski]

On your other problem

I get a very long table and I cannot scroll to the top of the table

see the output of

help scrollbufsize

for advice on how you can increase how far back you can scroll in the Stata's Results window. There are better ways to accomplish what you want in this case, as Nick discussed, but being able to scroll back farther can also be useful for solving other problems.

[Danah Abdul]

Many thanks and appreciation Nick Cox

I checked the groups command and it worked perfectly well.

This is the syntaxes for my request:

groups diagnosiscode , select(5) order(h)

For those interested in reading the article on groups, following is the link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf...867X1701700314

Thank you again

[Danah Abdul]

Hi William Lisowski

Thank you for sharing this information. I tried to increase how far I can scroll back in Stata's results window using this command:

set scrollbufsize #2000000

but I got an error message:

# found where number expected
r(198);

Can you help me please

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Remove the number sign.

[William Lisowski]

Danah Abdul -

The answer from Leonardo Guizzetti is right on target.

It is most unfortunate that, since the Stata documentation standard is to use italics to highlight something (a parameter, a variable name, a number) that you are meant to replace rather than copy, that the documentation for scrollbufsize tells us

        set scrollbufsize #

        10000 <= # <= 2000000

where the difference between their italicized number sign and a standard number sign is pretty much impossible to see unless the two of them are side-by-side

normal     #
in italics #

The next time I give this advice I'll try to remember to give an example.

Added in edit: And it's depressing to realize, having written the above, that anyone less than a third of my age probably knows the character "#" that I call the "number sign" as the "hash" character.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Added in edit: And it's depressing to realize, having written the above, that anyone less than a third of my age probably knows the character "#" that I call the "number sign" as the "hash" character.

I used to call this the pound sign but then I'd just get blank looks from people. It's funny how many names this symbol has, and that they reasonably correlate with one's age (or at least experience with technology).

[Nick Cox]

Google Jargon File ASCII for a collection of names for symbols. That source is a little old. I too call # hash and that seems common too. Full disclosure: I am a bit younger than William.

[Nick Cox]

http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html is the link implied in my previous.