Generate a variable for an entire household based on another variable for cross sectional data - variables

Question

I have a dataset on various households. Each household has various individuals. I want to take one entry(individual) for a specific variable and apply it to the entire household. Finally I want to perform regression on the household data and ignore the individuals. Eg:
Household id | Individual id | Variable 1
H1 | A1 |a
H1 | A2 | .
H1 | A3 | a
H1 | A4 | a
H2 | A1 | B
H2 | A2 | .
H3 | A1 | B
H3 | A2 | a
H3 | A3 | .
H3 | A4 | a
H3 | A5 | .
H3 | A6 | .
I want to create a data where :
Household id Variable 1
H1 | a
H2 | B
H3 | B
[EDIT : it is possible to do it through egen. I was trying to approach it through nested loops.
> foreach h in household_id{
> local d = 0
> local e = 0
> foreach i in individual_id{
> replace `d' = 1 if var1 == 1
> replace `e' = 2 if var1 == 2
> }
> foreach i in individual_id{
> replace a = 1 if `d' == 1
> replace a = 2 if `e' == 2
> }
> }
Here a is another variable which I will directly use to replace var1. The code gives an error :
0 invalid name
What are the corrections required in my code? Is there a fundamental flaw in my usage of local macros? Using tempvar didn't help either.

Answer 1

The code shown is very confused.
A loop over a single entity that is never referred to inside the loop is legal but just is equivalent to the statements inside, executed once.
Notice that you never refer to the local macros h or i within your loops.
Thus your code is equivalent to
local d = 0
local e = 0
replace `d' = 1 if var1 == 1
replace `e' = 2 if var1 == 2
replace a = 1 if `d' == 1
replace a = 2 if `e' == 2
That fails when the local macro d is first replaced by its contents, which results in
replace 0 = 1 if var1 == 1
and the error message is correct because 0 is not a valid variable name. The next statement would raise the same problem.
Stata never gets as far as testing
... if 0 == 1
... if 0 == 2
and those statements, although legal, would do nothing because the conditions will never be satisfied.
So far, so negative. I can't suggest code positively because I don't understand what you want to do. What you have posted doesn't look like real or realistic data. I suggest that you look at http://www.statalist.org/forums/help#stata which suggests how to post Stata data examples (and so is relevant here) and also at https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve (which does lay down the standard here).