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Re: AW: st: How to use the marco names?


From   Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: AW: st: How to use the marco names?
Date   Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:47:19 -0500

Not so.

First off, a literal string here is one marked as such by " " or `" "' delimiters.

Second, it is key that the -display- command never sees the text

`level'

as it is a reference to a local macro. Stata replaces the reference to the macro with its contents _before_ -display- ever gets to work. So, -display- sees

a b c

and without the " " that is not a literal string.

nICK

[email protected] wrote:

Nick, thank you for your help, which lets me understand more.

I suddenly think of  the following typing,

.local level  a b c

. di "`level'"
a b c

. di `"level"'
level

. di `level'
a not found
r(111);

If -di- is to display literal strings or the contents of the names supplied, the results for the above three should be,

`level' // literal string

error // no local name "level",but local name level.

a b c  // the contents of the names.


Please forgive my  ignorance, thank you.

Best regards,

Rose.





----- Original Message -----
From: Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: AW: st: How to use the marco names?
Date: 2009-8-6 22:38:04

In addition to other advice, note that a major issue here is not macros, but the use of -display-.

-display- is quite happy to display several things one after another. It is also happy to display literal strings or the contents of the names supplied. The " " or `" "' are essential to disambiguate.

Thus for example

di "a b c"

is an instruction to display the literal string "a b c". -display- neither knows nor cares what that string means.

In contrast,

di a b c

is an instruction to display the contents of a, followed by the contents of b, followed by the contents of c. -display- now needs to work at finding out what a, b and c are.

Nick

Rose a.k.a. [email protected] wrote:

Dear Martin,Dan and others,

I am completely confused by the use of local marco.

Take some examples,
r(files) after -fs-
r(names) after -est dir-

r(mean) after -su-

//maybe the three above are not local marco, but I need to use it in my following procedure.

r(levels) after -levelsof-
// it seems different when the type of variable following -levelsof- is different.
........

How to display and use them in my follwing procedure?
di `r(levels)'
di `"`r(levels)'"'
di `r(files)'
di `"`r(files)'"'
di `r(names)'
di r(mean)

Something similar is,
local x="1 2"
local x "1 2"
local x 1 2
local x: r(mean)

Concretely, when to add single quote and double quote? when to use colon?
especially,the difference among them.


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