st: RE: macro list limits strpos

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

-findname- (SJ ) is a user-written program. Please remember.... 

Your difficulty is that -strpos()- won't find items beyond a certain position in a string because of limits on the length of string it handles. This difficulty is explained in the 2008 posting you cite and is nothing whatsoever to do with memory or maxvar settings. The maximum is 244 in all flavours of Stata (12) and is not tunable. 

Try this: 

sysuse auto,clear
findname,type(string) local(vstr)
findname,type(int) local(vint)

foreach v of varlist * {
if `: list v in vstr' {
di "`v' is a string variable"
}
if `: list v in vint' {
di "`v' is an integer variable"
}
if `: list v in vother' {
di "`v' is not string nor integer variable"
}
}

In fact, notice that your logic can be simplified to 

sysuse auto,clear

findname,type(string) local(vstr)
findname,type(int) local(vint)

foreach v of varlist * {

	if `: list v in vstr' {
		di "`v' is a string variable"
	}
	else if `: list v in vint' {
		di "`v' is an integer variable"
	}
	else "`v' is not string nor integer variable"

}

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Jakob Petersen
Sent: 20 January 2012 10:30
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: macro list limits strpos

Statalist,

Problem: The following does not scale up to longer macro lists and 
variables at the end of longer macros are cut off.

***************************************************
sysuse auto,clear
findname,type(string) local(vstr)
findname,type(int) local(vint)
findname,local(vother)
local vother : list vother - vstr
local vother : list vother - vint
di "`vstr'"
di "`vint'"
di "`vother'"
foreach v of varlist * {
if strpos("`vstr'","`v'") {
di "`v' is a string variable"
}
if strpos("`vint'","`v'") {
di "`v' is an integer variable"
}
if strpos("`vother'","`v'") {
di "`v' is not string nor integer variable"
}
}
***************************************************

Any ideas?
Similar to: http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-01/msg00945.html

Tried increasing maxvar to no avail - is there away of increasing mem 
allocation here or is a different approach to -strpos- required?

Thanks,
Jakob Petersen

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