Re: st: foreach and globals and {.}

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

The ${} are used to make the name of a global macro explicit to Stata when 
the context would otherwise make it unclear -- primarily when you want to 
embed a global macro name in a text string:

di "abc${myglobal}def"

allows Stata to figure out that the global macro is called myglobal.  In the 
original pos, they don't need that syntax.

Michael Blasnik
michael.blasnik@verizon.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ulrich Kohler" <kohler@wz-berlin.de>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2005 7:04 AM
Subject: Re: st: foreach and globals and {.}



> Hans J. Baumgartner wrote:
> > Dear statalist,
> >
> > has anybody an idea how to solve the following problem?
> >
> >
> > foreach x in ${out_`year’} {
> > do something
> > }
> >
> > That is: I have several globals and I need the braces to tell Stata that
> > the local `year’ actually belongs to the global name.
> >
> > Now I would like to run a loop over all elements in the global
> > ${out_`year’}.
> >
> > But the foreach command gets puzzled with the braces around the global,
> > since it thinks that this means to start the loop. And this returns an
> > error that a code follows on the same line as open braces.
> I don't understand why you need the braces in ${out_`year'}. If 
> $out_`year'
> is a string, consisting out of several elements,
>
> foreach x in $out_`year' {
> do something
> }
>
> would be fine. If $out_`year' refers to a single element, which changes
> according to `year' within a loop, I cannot see why you start a loop at 
> all.
>
> (I must admit that I have never seen something like ${out_`year'}, and I 
> was
> kind of surprised that
>
> . global x "test"
> . di "${x}"
> test
>
> works. Can anybody tell me what that means?)
>
> uli
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