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Re: st: Programming Problem: How to prevent macro substitution


From   Christoph Birkel <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Programming Problem: How to prevent macro substitution
Date   Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:13:57 +0200

Eva, Nick,

thank you for your advice! I will try to transfer the generation of the temporary variables into the loop which generates the macro, and follow the suggestion of Nick, which seems to work well. Again: Many thanks!

Best,

Christoph

Eva Poen schrieb:


Nick, thank you.

I was looking for a solution that can be done independently of the
creation of the temporary variables, since this is how Christoph
started the thread. What I didn't realise is that my solution will
contain the interior double quotes, which a simple -display- will not
reveal:

. local test "hello " "hello"

. di "`test'"
hello hello

. di `"`test'"'
hello " "hello

It is therefore clearly not suitable, and plainly wrong. Thanks for
pointing it out to me. Austin gave a perfect, working solution.

I also agree that escaping macro substitution is often not the way
forward. At least I have managed to avoid it completely in my work.

Eva


2008/7/16 Nick Cox <[email protected]>:


I see. Well, there will be an almost equally simple way of doing that,
or an equivalent, and one which certainly won't entail escaping macro
substitution.

For example, suppose you are in a loop

Within some loop {
...
tempvar foo

local xlist `xlist' i.land|`foo'
...
}

Otherwise put, I don't think there is ever a problem for which lines
like

local ldep`u' "ldep`u'"

are part of the solution.

(We had a similar thread a while back in which someone asserted that it
was sometimes necessary to delay substitution, and I kept disputing
that. It's a myth that seems to grow out of trying to translate other
programming styles to Stata macro programming.)

Nick
[email protected]

Eva Poen

Thanks, Nick.

However, your suggestion does not produce the desired result:

. di "`xlist'"
i.land|ldep0 i.land|ldep1 i.land|ldep2

While Christoph was after:

. di "`xlist'"
i.land|`ldep0' i.land|`ldep1' i.land|`ldep2'

Unless I am missing something here.

Eva

2008/7/16 Nick Cox <[email protected]>:



I agree. In fact, I'd go one step further:

foreach u of numlist 0/2{
local xlist `xlist' i.land|ldep`u'
}

Sometimes the quotes just make things more complicated.

Eva Poen



take it in steps and it works:

foreach u of numlist 0/2{
local xlist "`xlist' " "i.land|" "`" "ldep`u'" "'"
}


-di "`xlist'"- returns

i.land|`ldep0' i.land|`ldep1' i.land|`ldep2'

on my machine.

2008/7/16 Christoph Birkel <[email protected]>:



I want to program a loop which produces a macro `xlist' containing a

list of


dummy variable interaction expansion expressions with temporary

variable


names `ldep0' , `ldep1' etc. as a string . For this purpose I wrote:
foreach u of numlist 0/`y2'{
local ldep`u' "ldep`u'"
local xlist "`xlist' i.land|``ldep`u'''"
}
The resulting macro should contain an expression like "

i.land|`ldep0'


i.land|`ldep1' i.land|`ldep2' " (when `y2' contains 2) which

can be


used as argument in -xi: reg-, as in: xi: reg yvar i.land `xlist' .

(The


temporary variables `ldep0' and so on, corresponding to the macros

are


generated later in a separate loop.)
What actually happens, is that, due to the single quotation marks,

the


macros containing the names of the temporary variables are subsituted

by


their content (which should not happen), so the content of the

resulting


macro is " i.land|ldep0 i.land|ldep1 i.land|ldep2 ", which cannot

be


used


to refer to temporary variables. For the same reason, it is not

possible to


define a local macro with a string as content which starts and ends

with


quotation marks. I found no way to avoid the unintended macro

substitution


using "\" or compound quotes. Any recommendation is highly

appreciated.

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--
Christoph Birkel, M.A.
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
-Studienfachberater BA-Studieng�nge Soziologie-
Martin-Luther-Universit�t Halle-Wittenberg
Institut f�r Soziologie
D-06099 Halle (Saale)
GERMANY
Tel.: ++ 49 3 45 / 55 24 22 5
Fax.: ++ 49 3 45 / 55 27 14 9 http://www.soziologie.uni-halle.de/birkel/



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