Hi Michael,
> I find that most Stata expressions that appear to
> require an -if-
> statement (as opposed to the -if- qualifier) can be transformed into
> something that does not, and it usually works better as well. In
> your case, one possibility would be something like (note: untested!):
>
> local zklist "cfd qds vfd tsa"
> foreach zk of local zklist {
> clear
> insheet a b c d e using "parsed_`zk'.txt", tab // Inlezen
>
> [some more commands]
> }
Unfortunately, I can't guarantee `zk' is part of `bestand'.
> Notes:
>
> 1. My personal preference is to use the perfectly fine
> carriage
> return delimiter, rather than littering one's code with semicolons;
> arguably in your case the use of -#delimit;- made it more difficult
> to find your error.
In reality, the insheet command is very long. And I do prefer to end lines
explicitly.
> 2. You don't say what "[some more commands]"
> constitutes, but if you
> don't need "x" later (which the above code presumes), then it's just
> more overhead that (empirically) can lead to potential errors.
Of course, I don't need it, but I do need `zk' and `bestand'. And as Stata
doesn't have asociative arrays or something like that, I do need to do it
the way I presented. I can't do
local zklist "cfd qds vfd tsa"
foreach zk of local zklist {
as I won't know which is the filename that belongs to zk. Do you know a
better workaround?
> 3. If you do not need the "bestand" local macro later,
> then you can
> follow the suggested code above. Otherwise, within the loop you can
> create a local macro as
>
> local bestand = "parsed_`zk'.txt"
Unfortunately not, otherwise I could have used your code. I had to make this
workaround.
> 4. It isn't clear to me that your -if- statements are
> literally
> invalid Stata code: they merely did not return the values you
> intended ("bestand" appears to have not been defined), which
> then led
> to problems down-stream. But I doubt any error reporting convention
> would have been able to identify your specific problem -- and the
> suggestions of Austin & Kit on debugging are worth following.
It is obvious that if -{- has as syntax rule to ignore following material,
it should check for following material and produce a warning, or better, an
error if material is found. Why do you have syntax rules if you don't check
them and just run along until the whole thing breaks down completely to
produce a totally irrelevant error message by that time?
Best regards,
-Hendri.
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