[Gretl-devel] Re: order of string-value codes

On 14/11/2023 16:24, Allin Cottrell wrote: > This is somewhat related to recent discussion of "Binary Logit with > string series". > > As you may know, when gretl reads string-valued series from (e.g.) a CSV > file, consecutive 1-based numeric codes are attached to the strings in > their order of occurrence. In some cases that's fine, but if the string > values have a "natural" ordering it may not be so fine. [...] > On importing these data "high" will get code 1, "low" code 2, and so on. > One may want to recode income as low=1, middle=2, high=3, and also > recode working as no=1, yes=2. That's not super difficult in hansl, but > I wonder if it would be worthwhile to provide a built-in function to do > the job: this could be a new function, or perhaps could be enabled as a > variant of strvsort(), via an optional second argument. I like the idea of giving a second argument to strvsort(), in the interest of keeping the namespace as compact as possible.