st: Re: Accumulating variable names to exclude from a varlist

[Partho Sarkar <partho.ss+lists@gmail.com>]

Dear colleagues,

I have been struggling for an hour or so with this  problem, which is
probably trivial for those more familiar with Stata macros than I am,
so hope someone can offer a tip w/o too much trouble:

In a part of a program to read in and process data, I want to do the following:

Check a list of variables to see which of them exist in the file being
processed, build up a list of the ones that do exist, and then sort
the data by the existing variables.  I have tried to do this as
follows:
--------------------------------------------------CODE
BEGINS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

local varlist1 "date commodityid varietyid state district market"  //
In the file I am using to test, only 3 of these are present
local except
*
 foreach v in `varlist1' {
         capture confirm variable `v'
         if _rc==0 {
                 local except `except'
                       }
                               else{
                               local except ` " `except'`v' " '   //
to accumulate the names of
the missing variables (spaces added here between quotes for clarity)
                               di "`except'"  // This works, as the
missing variables show up
cumulatively (w/o any spaces, though, in spite of the double quotes!)
                               }
                               local varlist2: list varlist1 - except
// trying to remove the
missing variable from the varlist-obviously this won't work as the
"except" macro resides within the above loop!
                               di "inner loop_""`varlist2'"
                                                  }

--------------------------------------------------CODE
ENDS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am sure this could be done via global macros, but somehow I took it
as a challenge to do w/o those ( I am also not very sure how to
combine local & global macros)!  [ Is delayed macro substitution the
answer? If so, how?]

Sorry if this is too trivial!

Best,
Partho
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