st: RE: Undocumented limitation of describe (and hence -ds-) in Stata 10?

["Nick Cox" <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

This question was almost entirely resolved. Michael was being bitten by
evaluating equals signs and misreading his experience.

On one marginal detail: -ds3- (SSC) doesn't have the limitation asserted
here any more than the official commands mentioned. But if you are
interested in -ds3- there is only one reason to use it rather than
-findname- (also SSC), namely that you are using Stata 7 or Stata 8.
(Neither applies in Michael's case.) 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Michael I. Lichter

I found out the hard way that the r(varlist) macro result returned by 
-describe, varlist- (and hence -ds- and Nick Cox's -ds3-) is limited to 
243 characters, at least on my computer running Stata 10. Is there a 
Stata setting I need to change? The help page says something about 
-maxvar-, but this doesn't seem like it should matter, and in any event 
doubling -maxvar- has on effect on this result. If this is not a 
settings issue, has it been fixed in Stata 11? Thanks.

-----
clear
forvalues i = 1/26 {
    gen byte testvar`i' = .
}
d, varlist
di r(varlist)
local x = r(varlist)
di `:length local x'
-----

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