Good morning,
It is feasible. And fairly easy with Stata's -file- command and string
functions. But you will have to define your own standards for adding "meta
information" to the ADO files (or borrow it from other languages -eg.
javadoc as you mention), and it is unlikely that you will find
user-written solutions that exactly fit what you want.
Adrian Mander's package -makehlp.ado- might be a very good starting point
though (findit makehlp returns a download site).
I recently did something similar too. My objective was to create a tool to
avoid the (painstaking IMHO) task of writing SMCL help files --very much
like the -makehlp- package--. Note that, rather than adding "meta data" in
the ADO files (as you suggest), I found it more flexible to define a
simple standard for a "Stata package description sheet": that is simply a
structured text file containing the material needed to create a
SMCL-formatted help file: title, description, date, syntax description,
author(s) name, etc. Then I wrote a parser (a Stata command) that reads
the "description sheet" file and generates the SMCL-help file (and other
things such as LaTeX-formatted doc). The most useful feature to this is
the direct translation of "syntax ..." statements, grabbed from the ADO
files.
I wrote the parser in Stata (using -file-), but as Nick Cox rightly
pointed out, it is certainly easier to write such a script in, say, AWK,
or some other scripting language well-equipped for parsing text files.
Yet, I preferred to keep everything in the same environment.
However, please, don't ask for the files! It is still pre-beta,
under-documented, (likely) bugged, and not robust, so I do not want to
share it (yet). Time permitting, I will certainly tidy it a bit and make
it suitable for distribution some day...
Hope this helps
Philippe
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
Philippe Van Kerm
Integrated Research Infrastructure
in the Socio-economic Sciences (IRISS)
CEPS/INSTEAD
BP48, L-4501 Differdange
G.-D. Luxembourg
[email protected]
RePEc profile: http://authors.repec.org/pro/pva19/
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
st: RE: automatic documentation for Stata ?
From
"Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To
<[email protected]>
Subject
st: RE: automatic documentation for Stata ?
Date
Fri, 7 May 2004 13:52:23 +0100
I'm not familiar with Javadoc.
I think it is highly possible. You would need
to read in a series of files, select the
relevant stuff, and write to a master file.
In Stata, you _could_ read in do files
as string variables, but a better approach
would probably be based on -file-.
However, it would be surprising if anyone had
anticipated your needs by writing some Stata
code to do precisely this. Also, fond though
I am of Stata, if this were my problem I would
use some scripting language (Awk, Perl, Python,
etc., etc.) or programmable text
editor to automate this task.
Iben Fasterholdt
> Is it possible to automatically generate documentation for
> Stata do-files in
> the same fashion as in for example javadoc?
>
> Introduction to javadoc, see the link below:
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/javadoc/
>
> We would like to be able to write something like the following:
>
> /*
> * @author (our names)
> * @version (versioninformation)
> * @description (description and usage of the program)
> * @param (program parameters)
> */
>
> program define ....
> syntax ......
> .
> .
> .
> end
>
> We would like to have a script that can gather all this
> information from
> different do-files, to one documentation-file. Does anyone
> know of such a
> script / program?
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