Re: st: Wishlist for Stata 13

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

David and others on versions before the present can always access
basic help for the current version on-line:

http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?confirm

The links at the foot of every Statalist posting give another example.

In this case I would try -quietly describe using <filename>- and see
if it's a Stata data file that you can read. If it's not, there will
be an error message.

Nick

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 9:32 PM, David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net> wrote:

> I have a wish, based on Stata 10. So I don't know if this has been taken
> care of in Stata 11 or 12.
>
> When using -confirm new file- or -confirm file-, it would be good if the
> file name could (optionally) be checked for the possibility of it being a
> .dta file.
> That is, suppose the filename is in a macro "filename", and my code looks
> like...
>
> confirm new file `filename'
> ...
> save `filename'
>
> Most of the time, I should really check...
> confirm new file `filename'.dta
> --as Stata interprets `filename' as `filename'.dta when saving it as a
> dataset. Thus, if I test only
> confirm new file `filename'
> and `filename' is "abc", and the file abc.dta exists, but abc (no dot) does
> not, then the -confirm- will pass, but the -save- will fail.
>
> The solution would seem to be to test...
> confirm new file `filename'.dta
> But it is not always correct, either, as there is an exception: if the name
> already has a "." in it, then -save- does not append ".dta".
> So the robust way to code this, as I see it, is...
> if strpos("`filename'", ".") {
>         confirm new file `filename'
> }
> else {
>         confirm new file `filename'.dta
> }
>
> or the equivalent one-liner:
> confirm new file `filename'`=cond(strpos("`filename'", "."), "", ".dta")'
>
> But I don't want to write all of that every time. It would be nice if that
> were built-in to -confirm-. Perhaps it would be a new syntax, such as
> -confirm new dta file- filename.
> Has anyone else had this issue?
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