How do I delete observations with no data in Stata?

stata data-cleaning
user2830684 picture user2830684 · Aug 6, 2014 · Viewed 25.9k times · Source

I have data with IDs which may or may not have all values present. I want to delete ONLY the observations with no data in them; if there are observations with even one value, I want to retain them. Eg, if my data set is:

ID val1 val2 val3 val4
1 23 . 24 75
2 . . . .
3 45 45 70 9

I want to drop only ID 2 as it is the only one with no data -- just an ID.

I have tried Statalist and Google but couldn't find anything relevant.

Answer

Dimitriy V. Masterov picture Dimitriy V. Masterov · Aug 6, 2014

This will also work with strings as long as they are empty:

ds id*, not
egen num_nonmiss = rownonmiss(`r(varlist)'), strok
drop if num_nonmiss == 0

This gets a list of variables that are not the id and drops any observations that only have the id.

Related questions

Convert a dta file to csv without Stata software

Is there a way to convert a dta file to a csv? I do not have a version of Stata installed on my computer, so I cannot do something like: File --> "Save as csv"

Read More
How to count the number of observations in R like Stata command count

aaa<- data.frame(sex=c(1,1,2,2,1,1), group1=c(1,2,1,2,2,2),group2=c("A","B","A","B","A","B")) stata command: count if sex==1 & group1==2 count if sex==1 & group2=="A" count counts the number of observations that satisfy the specified …

Read More
Loop over string variables in R

When programming in Stata I often find myself using the loop index in the programming. For example, I'll loop over a list of the variables nominalprice and realprice: local list = "nominalprice realprice" foreach i of local list { summarize `i' twoway (…

Read More