Re: st: varlist for keepus option of merge limited?

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Thanks, Daniel.

Curiously, abbreviations and wildcards work with keepus, only the range did not…

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 11:09 AM, daniel klein
<klein.daniel.81@gmail.com> wrote:
> I do not think this would be considered a bug, but I agree that
> documentatin is a bit missleading in this case. Another place where
> this behavior is documented is -describe-.
>
> Speculating on the reasons in the case of -merge-, I suspect the
> problem is, Stata cannot access the using dataset at the time you call
> -merge-, because the master dataset is in memory at that time.
> Therefore, in -merge.ado-  specifying the argument of the
> -keepusing()- option as a varlist would abort with an error most of
> the time (whenever a variable specified is not found in the _master_
> dataset). Stata programmers therefore declare the argument to be a
> string and probably the built-in command _merge, to which this
> argument is passed, does not treat and expand it as a variable list
> when checking the using dataset.
>
> I agree that it would be nice if either this fact was indicated in the
> help file or the code of -merge.ado- would be changed to allow a
> varlist specifying ranges with the - chracter.
>
> Best
> Daniel
>
> --
> Hi,
> This might be a bug in the Stata/MP 12.1 for Windows I am running, but
> I specified a range of variables for the keepus option
> ("keepus(PNR-edulvl)") and got an error that "variable PNR-edulvl" was
> not found in using dataset.
>
> Where is it documented that what syntax I can use with keepus() and what not?
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