SPSS Macro to search variable contents and assign new variable?

Tim Emahiser 0
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I'm trying to simplify some spss syntax I've inherited. The syntax is iterated hundreds of times.

I have 80 or so variables with text in them that say "Award1" "Award2" etc all the way up to "Award17"

The syntax as it's written now:

if (NYSRIRP = "AWARD17") NYSRIRP_AMT = Award17_AMT.

Is there a macro to iterate this code for every Award number and/or every variable eg. NYSRIRP (there are 80 of these).

spss
1 Answers

Not sure exactly how your data looks, so I'm sort of guessing here. If this doesn't fit the data please edit your question and add a description of the data and what the code is supposed to do.

define !doawards (!pos=!cmdend)
!do !i !in(!1)
!do !j=1 !to 17
if !i = !quote(!concat("AWARD", !j)) !concat(!i,"_AMT") = !concat("Award", !j, "_AMT").
!doend
!doend
!enddefine.

After running the macro definition above, you can call it with a list of the variables you want to iterate on, like this:

!doawards var1 var2 NYSRIRP var4 var5 .

The macro will iterate on your list of variables (please name all variables individually, don't use var1 to varX). For each variable it will iterate on numbers 1 to 17, and re-build your original command with the relevant variable name and relevant number.

eli-k0
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