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Re: st: Compund quotes and the -file write- command


From   "Eva Poen" <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Compund quotes and the -file write- command
Date   Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:32:25 +0100

Dear Nick,

thank you so much for your reply, and apologies for my late response.

I tried to implement your solution, and it works like a charm for
char(34), but not for a combination of char(34) and char(39) or
char(96), for the opening and closing quotes. Since I want to have
compound quotes printed as characters, I tried the following:

local compoundopen "`=char(96)'`=char(34)'"
local compoundclose "`=char(34)'`=char(39)'"

di `" `compoundopen' `compoundclose' "'

forvalues x = 1/`n' {
    file write `handle' "capture label variable `=VarName[`x']' "
    file write `handle' " `compoundopen' "
    file write `handle' " `=VarLabel[`x']' "
    file write `handle' " `compoundclose' "
    file write `handle' _n
}

I receive an "invalid syntax" error after line 2 of the loop. -set
trace on- reveals that the code does what I want it to do - only stata
doesn't like the syntax. Here are the relevant lines:

= file write _VarLabelsFile " `" "
invalid syntax

Replacing the 39 and 96 chars by the actual characters doesn't help.
I'd be very grateful for any ideas on how to solve this.

Kind regards,
Eva Poen

2007/8/9, n j cox <[email protected]>:
> As I understand it you want the inner compound double
> quotes to be printed as characters, to be interpreted
> later as delimiters, and not to be interpreted as
> delimiters by -file- as it reads your command line.
>
> I haven't tried it, but I guess that using the -char()-
> function may provide a solution. That is, wherever you
> would have
>
> "
>
> put
>
> `=char(34)'
>
> and so forth. -asciiplot- from SSC is one way of
> seeing a list of (your version of) ASCII characters.
> Royalties should be sent directly to the original authors.
>
> Nick
> [email protected]
>
> Eva Poen
>
> I am currently working with a large number of data sets (Stata 9)
> which all have a common structure and more or less the same variables.
> To ensure that variables are labeled consistently across data sets, I
> wrote a little program which defines these labels from information
> stored in an Access database. Everything works fine apart from one
> thing: I cannot have double quotes inside my variable labels. I tried
> numerous ways to incorporate compound quotes, to no avail.
>
> The relevant code follows below. There are two variables in memory at
> this point: one is called VarName; it holds all variable names for
> which I want to have common labels. The other one is VarLabel which
> holds the label information. The code generates a do-file which I can
> then run on my data sets as required.
>
> *************
> count
> local n = r(N)
>
> file open VarLabelsFile using VarLabelsFile.do, write replace
>
> forvalues x = 1/`n' {
>      file write `handle' `"capture label variable `=VarName[`x']'
> "`=VarLabel[`x']'" "' _n
> }
>
> file close VarLabelsFile
> *************
>
> My attempt was to introduce compound quotes like this:
> -file write `handle' `"capture label variable `=VarName[`x']'
> `"`=VarLabel[`x']'"' "' _n-
>
> But the resulting do-file still ends up looking like this:
>
> capture label variable SessionID "zTree (or other) Session ID
> (alpha-numeric)"
> capture label variable SID "unique Session ID (numeric)"
> etc.
>
> instead of like this:
> capture label variable SessionID `"zTree (or other) Session ID
> (alpha-numeric)"'
> capture label variable SID `"unique Session ID (numeric)"'
> etc.
>
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