Generic dispatcher used everywhere the source calls decode <cat>, gen (group) on a loop variable that could be any of several category columns.
If cat_name has an entry in value_labels, look up each value there;
otherwise (e.g. region_2d, ind_a38, reg_techgrad) the column is
already a plain string and is returned as-is.
Usage
decode_category(x, cat_name)
Arguments
- x
The category column (integer-coded or already character).
- cat_name
Name of the category (used to find the label map).
Value
A character vector.
Details
A leading lag prefix (L1, L2, L3, L6, ...) is stripped before the
lookup, so e.g. decode_category(x, "L3age_cat") resolves to the same map
as decode_category(x, "age_cat") — lagged category columns always mean
the same categories as their contemporaneous counterpart.