An alternative is 
local covars : subinstr local covars "var20" "" 
but this doesn't work word-wise and might catch 
text you don't want it to catch before the occurrence 
of "var20". (I have in mind that your real problem 
may be with variable names other than those you 
give in the example.) 
local purge var20 
local covars : list revcovs - purge 
is probably better. 
Nick 
[email protected] 
Dimitriy V. Masterov
 
> On 9/3/06, Kelvin Foo <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Elegance aside, my variable list, if too long, would get truncated
> > because I assigned the macro revcovs with the "=" sign in the first
> > line of my above code. Is there anyway to avoid the "=' sign in that
> > line?
> 
> There is a way to get around the character limit for parsing:
> 
> local purge "var20"
> local covars: list revcovs - purge
> 
> It's not very elegant. It seems like you should be able to do 
> something like
> 
> local covars: list revcovs - "var20",
> 
> but I don't know how to get it to work.
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