Hello, I have a mock data set and one variable is "country" with the corresponding two letters "AT" for the few observations in my mock data set. (HFCS dataset)

Now the actual data is stored at the university (security reasons) so I have to write the code and then let it run through the data there, when I am done.

I am having trouble though with the before mentioned country variable though. Even though it appears in the data set as letters (AT) it seems to be encoded as either numeric or something else.

if I type keep if country == "AT" I get a mismatch error. The variable is type long and the format is %8.0g (whatever that means).

So I tried to change it via tostring and typed in the command

tostring country , generate(count)

But now the new variable doesn't have AT anymore, instead it has the number 1 for each entry. Although if I now put in the command

keep if count == "1" (doesn't work without the "", so it seems to be coded as non numeric) it at least performs the command and seems to yield no errors.

I was just wondering, is there a way to change the country variable in such a way, that I do keep the two letters and not change that into a number? Otherwise it will get very confusing once I have access to the entire data set and now have over 20 different countries.