First, and perhaps perversely, I'd recommend something
different. Why insist on commas? Why not recommend
a space-separated list? (If names might include spaces,
then they can be bound in quotes.) There are
several arguments for this preference -- many of them
are small points but in general I think space-separated
lists have the edge.
Second, see help on -limits- or [R] limits.
Nick
[email protected]
Michael Ingre
> I'm working on a program that will need to accept long
> arguments to be
> parsed to the programs. Typically, an argument will be
> several lists of
> names separated by a comma (","). The argument will then
> the be tokenized
> into several sub-lists for further processing. This can
> easily be done in
> Stata with strings passed as an argument and then
> tokenized. However,
> strings has a limit (I think) of 244 characters.
>
> program define longarguments
> syntax argument(string)
>
> tokenize "`argument'" , parse(",")
>
> ....
> ....
>
>
> Is it possible to pass very long arguments (300-1000
> characters) to a
> program on the commandline? And what is the maximum limit
> of characters (or
> elements) a macro list can hold?
>
> I think I read somewhere that a macro can hold very long
> lists (like 32768
> characters or something) but now I can't find it in the manuals.
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