RE: st: How to separate multiple word assignments to a macro

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

A small footnote to this excellent answer. 

An alternative to 

local TreasRatesDisplay `""5 Yr Treas Rate" "10 Yr Treas Rate" "20 Yr 
Treas Rate""'
local a : word 1 of `TreasRatesDisplay'
local b : word 2 of `TreasRatesDisplay'
local c : word 3 of `TreasRatesDisplay'

is 

local TreasRatesDisplay `""5 Yr Treas Rate" "10 Yr Treas Rate" "20 Yr 
Treas Rate""'
tokenize `"`TreasRatesDisplay'"' 
args a b c 

There is clearly not much in it in this example. 

But 

1. The -tokenize- automatically produces local macros 1, 2, 3, etc. so
you need not use a, b, c etc. The last line could be dropped. 

2. You could combine the first two lines 

tokenize `""5 Yr Treas Rate" "10 Yr Treas Rate" "20 Yr Treas Rate""'

3. With several elements, not 3, the advantage increases. 

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

Michael Norman Mitchell

   I wonder if this would do the trick for you...

local TreasRatesDisplay `""5 Yr Treas Rate" "10 Yr Treas Rate" "20 Yr 
Treas Rate""'

You could extract the three pieces like this...

local a : word 1 of `TreasRatesDisplay'
local b : word 2 of `TreasRatesDisplay'
local c : word 3 of `TreasRatesDisplay'

And then you can display the three pieces like this

. di "The first word is `a'"
The first word is 5 Yr Treas Rate

. di "The second word is `b'"
The second word is 10 Yr Treas Rate

. di "The third word is `c'"
The third word is 20 Yr Treas Rate

   The key is using the -compound double quotes- which start with `" and

end with "' . These are like super duper quotes that can hold a quoted 
string, and Stata understand that each quoted pair is a different
-word-.

   You can even extact the number of words using the "word count" 
function...

. local wc : word count `TreasRatesDisplay'
. di `wc'
3

   I hope this is helpful.

Michael N. Mitchell
See the Stata tidbit of the week at...
http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com

On 2010-04-09 4.45 PM, Thomas Jacobs wrote:
> I am trying to create a macro of readable variable names for later
> output in multiple tables.  Thus, the number of variable names will
> change.  For example assume I have a case with three values such as
>
> 5 Yr Treas Rate, 10 Yr Treas Rate, 20 Yr Treas Rate
>
> which I wish to assign to the macro TreasRatesDisplay
>
> Is there any way to do this and end up with just 3 values in the macro
> where each value may have embedded spaces?  Thanks.

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