Re: st: varlist for keepus option of merge limited?

[daniel klein <klein.daniel.81@gmail.com>]

I do not think this would be considered a bug, but I agree that
documentatin is a bit missleading in this case. Another place where
this behavior is documented is -describe-.

Speculating on the reasons in the case of -merge-, I suspect the
problem is, Stata cannot access the using dataset at the time you call
-merge-, because the master dataset is in memory at that time.
Therefore, in -merge.ado-  specifying the argument of the
-keepusing()- option as a varlist would abort with an error most of
the time (whenever a variable specified is not found in the _master_
dataset). Stata programmers therefore declare the argument to be a
string and probably the built-in command _merge, to which this
argument is passed, does not treat and expand it as a variable list
when checking the using dataset.

I agree that it would be nice if either this fact was indicated in the
help file or the code of -merge.ado- would be changed to allow a
varlist specifying ranges with the - chracter.

Best
Daniel

-- 
Hi,
This might be a bug in the Stata/MP 12.1 for Windows I am running, but
I specified a range of variables for the keepus option
("keepus(PNR-edulvl)") and got an error that "variable PNR-edulvl" was
not found in using dataset.

Where is it documented that what syntax I can use with keepus() and what not?
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