Re: st: how to have commands in a loop (over strings) shown in log files, without using nested quotes

[Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Xinjia Liu wrote:
> I am trying to run a command with several different "if" conditions,
> and have both the commands and the results shown in a log file.
<snip>
> If I use a loop to avoid typing the command repeatedly...
>
> foreach val in "a" "b" "" {
> table var1 var2 if var3 == "`val'", c(n var4)
> }
>
> The problem with the loop is, only the resulting table would show in
> the log file, not the actual command.
<snip>
> If I try to do
>
> log using...
> foreach ... {
> display "cmd..."
> cmd...
> }
> log close
>
> I would need to somehow (e.g. using `"') include double quotes in the
> cmd string, which could very easily introduce bugs that are hard to
> fix.

The way to do that is to use compound quotes, as you suggest. So, type
-display `"cmd..."'- instead of -display "cmd..."-. I do not see how
you think that that would be buggy. The difficulty with nesting
strings and regular double quotes is that it becomes ambiguous which
quote is a closing quote and which quote is an opening quote. That is
solved by using compound quotes, so that is that.

-- Maarten

---------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
WZB
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
---------------------------------
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