Martin referred you to an article by me, which is certainly pertinent. Note that this issue is thoroughly ventilated in the manuals at [U] 18.3.11.
The bottom line for you is to use forward slashes for Windows filepath delimiters. Stata will happily translate.
N.B. what you call macrovariables are in Stata called local macros.
Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
Martin Weiss
http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=pr0042
Steinar Fossedal
> I'm having problems combining macrovariables when the first macro ends
> with a backslash. Apparently, the end backslash is not included, and
> the following macro is not unpacked. This is not a problem if the two
> macros do not follow each other directly. The example below
> illustrates the problem:
>
>
> local indatadir e:\data\stata10\
> local table mytable
>
> di "indatadir <`indatadir'>"
> di "table <`table'>"
>
> // Backslash missing, macro `table' not unpacked:
> di "`indatadir'`table'"
> // Backslash ok and `table' unpacked when adding a sign (any letter)
> behind the first macro:
> di "`indatadir'_`table'"
>
>
>
> The result is as follows:
>
> local indatadir e:\data\stata10\
>
> . local table mytable
>
> .
> . di "indatadir <`indatadir'>"
> indatadir <e:\data\stata10\>
>
> . di "table <`table'>"
> table <mytable>
>
> .
> . // Backslash missing, macro `table' not unpacked:
> . di "`indatadir'`table'"
> e:\data\stata10`table'
>
> . // Backslash ok and `table' unpacked when adding a sign (any letter)
> behind the first macro:
> . di "`indatadir'_`table'"
> e:\data\stata10\_mytable
>
>
>
> What is the reason behind this, and how can I work around it?
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