Dear Statalisters:
A couple of questions for you:
1. What do you think of clickable examples in a command help file?
That is, if the example in the help file is
ivreg2 y1 x1 x2 (y2 y3 = z1 z2 z3), gmm ffirst
and you click on this line, then the command is executed. It's
possible to do this in smcl with {stata <command> : <text of the
command> } , but is it worth it?
2. This would work only if the dataset that the example uses is in
memory. I tried to put a clickable command to load the data in the
help file with the command
{stata use "http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/data/macro/abdata.dta"; : . stata
use http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/data/macro/abdata.dta}
where the part following the : separator is the clickable text to
display to the user, and the "" are used because the URL contains a :.
Unfortunately, what gets displayed is
//fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/data/macro/abdata.dta" : . use http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/data/macro/abdata.dta
(all on one line)
and when I click on it, Stata tries to execute the command
use "http
with the following result:
. use "http
file http.dta not found
r(601);
What's happening is that Stata is ignoring the "" and treats the
first : in the URL as the separator for the smcl command.
I'm using Stata 7 (but hoping to update soon....). Does this happen
in Stata 8 too? Any ideas on a Stata 7 (or 8) workaround?
--Mark
Prof. Mark E. Schaffer
Director
Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation
Department of Economics
School of Management & Languages
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS UK
44-131-451-3494 direct
44-131-451-3008 fax
44-131-451-3485 CERT administrator
http://www.som.hw.ac.uk/cert
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