Understanding this hinges rather delicately on
knowing how Stata works. Scott commendably didn't underline
the way in which his solution is smart but
I will do that for him. The principle is the
same whatever the number of variables so
I will simplify to three,
x1 x2 x3
which Scott has constructed as partly missing.
Let's pick up the story with
unab a : x*
This expands the wild card -x*- and puts
the result, which in our case will be
x1 x2 x3
into the local macro -a-. Naturally this is trivial
with just three names, but the point is that you could
the same thing with no more typing and very many more
variables in -x*-.
Now
local b: subinstr local a " " " != . & ", all
says
substitute in the string contained in the local macro -a-
in the following way: take every space and replace it by
" != . & "
and put the result into local macro -b-. The double
quotes are delimiters in every instance and not part of
the strings being specified.
So, let's do that by hand: There are two spaces, one
between "x1" and "x2" and one between "x2" and "x3"
so that after that local macro -b- contains
x1 != . & x2 != . & x3
We have to know here that -unab- does not
add leading or trailing spaces. There are ways
of finding that out....
Now as his final flourish Scott writes
l x* if `b' != .
Now what happens next is a strict one-two:
One, Stata sees a local macro name there and
substitutes the contents of the local macro in
the same place. So the command now reads
l x* if x1 != . & x2 != . & x3 != .
You see what has happened? Scott has arranged things
so the the -if- condition ends with
!= .
as it should.
Two, that command is what -list- sees, and will
execute.
Quite separately of all this the code could be tweaked to
cope with extended missings .a to .z, but that's easily
done, say by changing != to <.
Nick
[email protected]
[email protected]
> You might be able to use the extended macro function -subinstr- and -
> unab-
>
> For example:
> clear
> set obs 100
> set seed 1234
> forv i = 1/10 {
> qui gen x`i' = uniform()
> qui replace x`i' = . if uniform()<.2
> }
>
> unab a: x*
> local b: subinstr local a " " " != . & ", all
> disp "`b'"
> l x* if `b' != .
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