I need to manually create a small number of new observations, with values for some variables that are drawn from observations already in the dataset.

-input- won't accept observation references, at least as I'm using it, so the following code returns an error: 'region' cannot be read as a number.

Code:
input
1 region[32] .    .   0
end
The only alternative I can think of is to create these observations blank and then use -replace-, but that would be quite unwieldy, since (I think) I'd need to run a separate replace command for each variable of each observation. In my full project I need to create about 30 of these observations, each with 5 variables filled by reference to an existing observation.

I'm hoping there is just some option on -input- or perhaps way of using a local macro to get around this; if not I will post an explanation of the full problem that has me needing to do this.