Useful STATA Commands

Note: Built-in commands are marked with an asterisk (*).

Tools

• ftools: Mata commands for factor variables.
• gtools: A suite of commands that use hashes for a speedup over traditional stata commands.
• github: Searching, installing, and managing Stata packages from GitHub.
• halltool: A Stata toolbox (commands) developed by Hall.
• unique: Unique values of a variable or group of variables.
• egenmore: Extensions to command generate.

Data Cleaning

• winsor2: Winsorizing or Trimming variables. Devekloped by Yujun Lian.

String Functions

• *substr(s, n1, n2): The substring of s, starting at n1, for a length of n2.
• *subinstr(s1, s2, s3, n): The first n occurrences in s1 of s2 will replaced with s3.
• fdta variables, from(s1) to(s2): Replace si with s2 in all variables.
• *regexm(s,re): Evaluates to 1 if regular expression re is satisfied by the ASCII string s; otherwise, 0.
• *regexr(s, re, s2): Replaces the first substring within ASCII string s1 that matches regular expression re with ASCII string s2.

Analysis & Regressions

• reghdfe: Regression with High-Dimensional Fixed Effects.
• ppmlhdfe: Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood with High-Dimensional Fixed Effects.

Tabulation, Reporting, Visualization, and Documentation

• fre: One-way frequency tables.
• esttab: Display and export formatted regression table.
  • Here is the global macro I frequently use for esttab options.

    global ESTTAB_OPT replace cells(b(star fmt(%9.3f)) se(par fmt(%9.3f))) ///
        stats(N r2_a, ///
            label("Obs." "AR2" ) ///
            fmt(%9.0fc %9.3f ) ///
        ) ///
        star(* 0.1 ** 0.05 *** 0.01)

• parmest: save coefficients and standard errors from regression results into a dta file.

Others

• *which: Display location of an ado-file.
• adoedit: Open an ado-file.

Some usefule command blocks

Format long string variables

Format all long string variables to 30 characters while keeping the original format for short string variables.

local chmax 30
foreach var of varlist * {
    local fmt: format `var'
    local fmt: subinstr local fmt "%" "", all
    local fmt: subinstr local fmt "s" "", all
    cap local fmt = (`fmt' > `chmax')
    if `fmt' == 1 {
        cap format `var' %`chmax's
    }
}

If you have halltool installed, you can do this:

fmtstr

Loop for multiple files in a folder

local folder_path = "./the_folder_path"
local file_type = ".dta"
local files: dir "`folder_path'" files "*`file_type'"
foreach file of local files {
    local pref = substr("`file'", 1, 1)
    if "`pref'" != "." {
        * Do something
    }
}

Remove a folder and its contents

local folder = "./the_folder_path"

*** On MacOS
shell rm -r "`folder'"
shell mv -f "`folder'" ~/.Trash

*** On Windows
shell rd "`folder'" /s /q

shell mv on MacOS is probably safer because you can resotre the folder from the Trash if you want to.