Keeping selected values of a variable

[Noah Mkasanga]

One of a variable in my dataset contains many values and I would like to keep 30 values out of more than 500 using Stata 13. The variable is in string format so I tried to use the keep if inlist(variable, x1, x2,..) but Stata returned a message that the list is long. In this forum, I found an egen command option but it requires numeric values. Please help and thank you in advance.

[Andrew Musau]

See https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...ssion-too-long. If these are numerical values stored as string, nothing stops you from creating a numerical variable and using this with -inlist()- or using the -real()- function.

destring var1, gen(var2)
keep if inlist(var2, ...)

or

keep if inlist(real(var1), ...)

[Noah Mkasanga]

Andrew,
Thank you. I followed the link you provided. The inlist2 worked fine for me.

[Nick Cox]

https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/d...s-for-subsets/ explains a different approach that is often appropriate.