Hello,

I have a dataset with ~881k observations and 621 variables that I'm just beginning to clean.

The vast majority of the data is numeric but I have a chunk of 87 variables that are stored as string and contain either "yes", "no" or ".". I can encode them in a loop using the below but this also encodes "." as a number.

I have read the help files on encode and searched several posts and articles but I'm beginning to think it either isn't possible and I need to approach it another way or i'm missing something plainly obvious that I just cannot see?

foreach v of varlist var1-var87{
encode `v', generate (new`v')
drop `v'
rename new`v' `v'
}

Any advice would be appreciated.

I'm using STATA 16 SE

Aidan