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st: RE: Problem putting enclosed brackets.

From   "Nick Cox" <>
To   <>
Subject   st: RE: Problem putting enclosed brackets.
Date   Thu, 1 Apr 2010 11:53:34 +0100

The problem is with double quotation marks "", informally often known as (double) quotes. 

(The word brackets even at its most generous doesn't I think extend beyond 

round brackets or parentheses () 

[square] brackets []

and curly brackets or braces {}.) 

The problem is that Stata uses " " in two ways, as string delimiters and as literal characters. First time round, the " " are being interpreted as delimiters and as such stripped. 

Although I tried a few solutions using compound double quotes `" "' I also failed to get precisely what Amadou wants. So, I am tempted to change the question. Why do you want precisely this? I suspect that there are other ways of getting the same ultimate result. 


Amadou B. DIALLO, PhD.

I want to have the following labels of my variables enclosed into
encapsulated brackets but the code fails:

Instead of having the following desired form:
"Augmenté" "Inchangé" "Diminué" "Non concerné"

I have :
Augmenté "Inchangé" "Diminué" "Non concerné"

I.e. stata keeps ignoring the first label value.

My code is as follows:

qui foreach i of local vars {
loc vall : val la `i'
if "`vall'" ~= "" {
   levelsof `i', l(l)
   foreach k of local l {
      loc lab : lab `vall' `k'
      loc names `names' "`lab'" // loc names `names' "`: lab `vall' `k''"
di `"`names'"'

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