Problem with drop

[Euslaner]

I thought that this should be simple. I entered the wrong values for some variables and want to delete them. So I typed:

drop a - b if countryout == 1
where a - b are the incorrect variables and countryout is a variable equal to 1 if the case has the wrong variables. I get the message that I cannot use an if statement, but the manual says that this is allowed. What am I doing wrong, please? Thanks.

Ric Uslaner

[Maarten Buis]

You can only drop entire observations (rows) or entire variables (columns). You cannot drop single cells. So the correct syntax would be either drop a-b, which will drop the variables a-b in their entirity or drop if countryout == 1 which will drop entire observations where the variable countryout equals 1. But you cannot combine the two syntaxes. Instead you could replace their values with a missing value (.).