Looping in Stata

Looping in Stata is mainly achieved by use of the foreach command. Using the nlsw88 dataset we'll generate a new variable with observations containing the square root of each observation in the variable wage:

sysuse nlsw88, clear  

foreach i in wage { 
    gen gen`i' = sqrt(`i') 
}

su genwage

The foreach loop is pretty straight forward - we generate a variable with the prefix gen followed by name of variable containing the square root of each observation in the variable wage. Then we summarize the new variable: