RE: st: foreach global macro not working with multiple macros

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

You can't wildcard anything other than variable names to my knowledge. 

The use of macros, even though you can use only one at a time, is that you can put everything in it. It's like being able to use an indefinitely extensive bag for all your shopping. 

If you go 

. mac li 

you can see all your globals. Copy and paste from your Results windows into your do-file editor and hack around and you can get a list of names. Suppose you have globals p1, p2, p3, ..., p200. You can do this 

foreach i in num 1/200 { 
	... $p`i' 
}

That is, you can delay the global reference until inside the loop. 

There may well be other ways to do it. 

What are you using globals for any way? I don't use globals from one month to the next. That's partly taste. It's not for lack of using Stata. 

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

Nick Mosely

Thanks, guys. That does work, Eric. Unfortunately I have about 100
macros that I would like to loop over. Their names all start with the
letter p, so I was hoping to do something like the following:

foreach y of global p* {

I wonder, what is the use of -foreach- with macros if you can only use
one at a time?
I guess I'll have to find another way.

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Eric Booth <ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu> wrote:

> I also find it useful to combine the global macros before the loop (esp. if there's repetition in the elements), e.g.
>
> **************!
> global cash "pocket asdf bank"
> global check "bank"
> **
> global all: list global(cash) | global(check)
> di `"${all}"'
> **
> foreach y of global all {
> display "`y'"
> }
> **************!

On Feb 2, 2011, at 11:19 AM, Eric Booth wrote:

>> So you could change it to:
>>
>> *****
>>> global cash "pocket"
>>> global check "bank"
>>> foreach y in $cash $check {
>>> display "`y'"
>>> }
>> *****
>>
>> to get it to work.
>>
>> On Feb 2, 2011, at 11:15 AM, Maarten buis wrote:
>>
>>> --- On Wed, 2/2/11, Nick Mosely wrote:
>>>> I would like to create a for loop using global macros but
>>>> Stata continues to return an error message.
>>>>
>>>> This code works fine:
>>>>
>>>> global cash "pocket"
>>>> foreach y of global cash {
>>>> display "`y'"
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> The following, code on the other hand, does not:
>>>>
>>>> global cash "pocket"
>>>> global check "bank"
>>>> foreach y of global cash check {
>>>> display "`y'"
>>>> }
>>>
>>> In -foreach- of local / of global you can specify only
>>> one name of a local or global macro. You specified two.

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