rename

On the face of it, this is one of the easiest and most boring commands. To rename the variable, run rename oldname newname. But this command has its bag of tricks. Access the help file for rename group to take a look (help rename group). Some of the prominent ones:

• Instead of running rename on separate lines for two variables, you can run it at once:

rename (oldname_var1 oldname_var2 ...) (newname_var1 newname_var2 ...)

• Don’t like upper case letters in your variable name? To convert variable names to lower case:

rename oldname_var1 oldname_var2 ..., lower

To convert everything to uppercase, use the option upper instead of lower above.

• The best use I have found is the ability to use wildcard characters to remove/add prefixes or suffixes from/to variable names. For example, we currently have date_day, date_month, and date_year variables in the dataset. Suppose you want to remove the “date_” bit from the names in one go:

rename date_* *

Stata first identifies variables starting with “date_”. * acts as a stand-in/wildcard for whatever letters come after “date_”. In this, * stands for day, month, or year. And so, Stata accordingly renames the three variables.

Suppose we want to remove the prefix date_ and add a suffix _date to these variable names:

rename date_* *_date