st: Extracting a variable of a varliable list

[Thomas Corneli�en <cornelissen@mbox.iqw.uni-hannover.de>]

Dear Stata Users,
I want to write an ado file using the -syntax- command as follows:

syntax varlist(min=2) [if] [in]

The first variable in varlist is the dependent variable, the others are the 
independent variables. I need to access them seperately in my ado-file.
Therefore I create a local that contains the name of the dependent variable, 
i.e. the first word of the varlist-string, and a local that contains all the 
rest and can be used as a varlist of only the independent variables.

local depvar=word("`varlist'",1)

local indepvar=substr("`varlist'",length("`depvar'")+1,length("`varlist'"));

My problem is that if the varlist is very long, it gets cut off at the 81st 
character. It seems that both the -length- and the -substr- function can 
only be applied to strings up to 81 characters.

I tried also to precede 'varlist' in the -syntax- command by 'varname', 
'name' or 'anything' to capture the independent variable, but that returns 
error messages.

Can anybody suggest a better way to do what I want to do? Is there a good 
way of splitting one varlist into two varlists?
Thanks a lot for any suggestions!
Thomas

------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Cornelissen
Empirical Economic Research
University of Hannover, Germany 
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