How can I rank observations within groups in Stata?

Question

I have some data in Stata which look like the first two columns of:

group_id   var_to_rank  desired_rank
____________________________________

1           10         


        

Answer 1

@radek: you surely got it sorted out in the meantime ... but this would have been an easy (though not very elegant) solution:

bysort group_id:   egen desired_rank_HELP =rank(var_to_rank), field
egen desired_rank      =group(grup_id desired_rank_HELP)
drop desired_rank_HELP