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Re: st: Stata 6 vs. 7


From   Weihua Guan <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Stata 6 vs. 7
Date   Tue, 10 Sep 2002 09:38:40 -0500

--As a followup, Hung-Jen Wang <[email protected]> wrote:                    
[...]
> The only quirk left though
> is that the program does not accept space as a legitimate empty option
> value. That is, suppose I want the option value of -myopt- to be
> empty, myexpl, myopt()
>         
> is fine, but
>        myexpl, myopt( )
>        
> isn't (note the space in the option). Stata actually treats it as a
> non-empty option value, resulting in undesired parsing which returns
> ")" (no quotes) as the parsed value of -myopt-.

And Hung-Jen suggested

> To fix the small oddity, after
> 
>        tokenize `myopt', parse("()")
>        local myopt `3'
> 
> I can do the check again,
> 
>       if "`myopt'" == ")"{
>          local myopt ""
>       }

Hung-Jen's suggestion is fine.  I modified my original program as follows:

	program define myexpl
        	version 6
        	syntax [, myopt(passthru)]
        	if "`myopt'" != "" {
                	tokenize `myopt', parse("()")
			if "`3'" != ")" {
                		local myopt `3'
				unab myopt : `myopt'
				confirm numeric var `myopt' 
                		summ `myopt'
			}
			else {
				local myopt
			}
        	}

        	if "`myopt'" == "" {
                	di "myopt() is empty"
        	}
	end


Note that besides the check for ")", I also added two other commands.  

1) -unab- not only unabbreviates the varlist, but also helps to check whether
the variables specified are valid.  If the user mistypes a variable name which
is not in the memory,  the program will exit with error.

. myexpl, myopt( pr mpg notexist)
notexist not found
r(111);

2) -confirm- helps to confirm the variables are numeric.  This is optional and
can be modified to check other types of variables.


Weihua Guan <[email protected]>
Stata Corp.

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