Re: st: creating a table of own design

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You seem to be in some doubt about

 mat A = ("a"\"b")

but that will produce an error message of -type mismatch- and the
reason in turn is simple: Stata matrices are for numbers only and may
not include strings.

Here's how Stata introduces matrices at [U] 14.1.1

"To Stata, a matrix is a named entity containing an r x c (0 < r <=
matsize, 0 < c <=   matsize) rectangular  array of double-precision
numbers (including missing values) that is bordered by a row and a
column of names."

Learning Stata programming is tricky, but made less tricky by
approaching it the right way. Here's my RST method for learning Stata
programming.

Read the documentation. There's really no alternative. [U] contained
the first and in many ways still one of the best treatments. (Your
problem, as above, is explained directly in [U].) Kit Baum's book
http://www.stata.com/bookstore/stata-programming-introduction/ is also
well paced and well explained.

Slow but sure. Learners often slap down several lines of code and then
say, "Why isn't my program working?" Focus on one line at a time and
think about getting each one right. If you are learning, ten lines of
code can be very long, but Stata will stop at the first error,
regardless of whether later code is good.

Test, test, test. Stata's debugging environment is not spectacular,
but it's more than enough to help progress. -set trace on- often
helps. Most of the tests one needs are a matter of looking at the
data, macros, scalars, matrices, to see what they are (or whether
Stata can see them).

To build up a table as you intend, I recommend simply using -display-
to produce a line at a
time.http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=pr0053 may
help.

On "local variable", see

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-08/msg01258.html

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com

On 9 December 2013 05:00, Jason Park <loooooo.j8311@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not being perfectly familiar with the Stata's programing language, I'm
> struggling doing some easy stuff that could easily be done in other
> languages. Please forgive me if I'm asking about too basic a thing
> that most of you already know.
>
> I got to the point where I can generate some figures that I need in a
> do file, and now I want to tabulate them.
> Suppose the local variables those figures are saved in are a and b.
> My intention is to present a table looking like below (not necessarily
> with the broken lines though or the header):
>           z-stat
> ------------------
> a       1.2345
> b       1.1234
> ------------------
>
> So far, I tried to create a matrix containing strings, A and B, and
> another matrix with the figures, and join side by side, which didn't
> work anyhow.
> The faulty code I wrote is:
>      mat A = ("a"\"b")
>      mat B = (`a'\`b')
>      mat C = A,B
>      mat list C
> It seems that the first line is returning an error. Neither does A =
> ("a"\"b") work.
>
> Could someone give me some tips? It will be greatly appreciated if
> someone suggests a better way of tabulation, but if not, it will also
> be equally appreciated if someone helps me get my code to work.
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