Use value label in if command

Question

I am working with a set of dta files representing surveys from different years.

Conveniently, each year uses different values for the country

Answer 1

Try

replace country=1 if countryO=="Japan":country0valuelabel
replace country=2 if inlist(countryO,"South Korea":country0valuelabel,"Korea":country0valuelabel)

You will have to replace country0valuelabel with the corresponding value label name in your data. You can find out its name by looking at the penultimate column in the output of describe country0.