Writing a local macro with string content

[Beth Wallace]

Hello Statalisters,

I apologize if this has been addressed elsewhere -- I've been working on this problem off and on for several weeks and (I think) have reviewed all posts and manual sections that touch on the issue I'm having, without success

I'm in stata 14.2, and for months have been having trouble getting any local containing text to work. For example, I try to write a local to define my cd, as follows

local ddir "C:\Users\blablabla"

But when I type

di `ddir'

nothing happens

I've worked around this till now.
I now have a survey with several questions in a matrix, all with the same yes/no response options (yes =1, no = 2). It looks something like this:

If you went to the grocery store today, would you
1) buy eggs, yes/no
2) buy butter, yes/no
3) buy vegetables, yes/no

Currently, variable representing question 1 is v_1, var representing question 2 is v_2, etc.
I want to write a loop that renames all of these variables "grocery_eggs", "grocery_butter", etc

I tried the following code, based on a prior post on this topic:

label define yesno 1 "Yes" 2 "No"
local grocery "eggs butter veg"
local n : word count `grocery'

forvalues i = 1/`n'    {
    foreach var of varlist v_1-v_3    {
            gen `var'l = `var'
            label values `var'l yesno
            forvalues i = 1/`n'        {
                local a : word `i' of `grocery'
                label `var'l "grocery_"`a'
                }
            }

It doesn't work, and when i troubleshot by trying

di `grocery'

, the same thing happened as above -- nothing displayed
I tried double quotes in both the local definition, ie

local grocery "`eggs butter veg'"

and

local grocery `"eggs butter veg"'

as well as in the display command involving the local with string, ie

di `"grocery"'

and

di "`grocery'"

and neither worked

Thank you very much in advance!
-Beth