Inlist Expression too long

[Yasin Kantar]

Hi guys,

I am a Stata beginner and have a problem in generating a dummy called aggregate.
I tried it with inlist(), but as my list is very long I get an error message "Expression too long".

This is my code:

#delimit ;
gen aggregate = inlist(countryname,"Arab World", "Caribbean small states",
"Central Europe and the Baltics",
"East Asia & Pacific (all income levels)",
"East Asia & Pacific (developing only)",
"Euro area", "Europe & Central Asia (all income levels)",
"Europe & Central Asia (developing only)",
"Europe and Central Asia (IFC classification)",
"European Union", "Fragile and conflict affected situations",
"Heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC)",
"High income", "High income: nonOECD", "High income: OECD",
"Latin America & Caribbean (all income levels)",
"Latin America & Caribbean (developing only)",
"Latin America and the Caribbean (IFC classification)",
"Least developed countries: UN classification",
"Low & middle income", "Low income", "Lower middle income",
"Middle East & North Africa (all income levels)",
"Middle East & North Africa (developing only)",
"Middle income", "North America", "OECD members",
"Other small states", "Pacific island small states",
"Small states", "South Asia",
"Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)",
"Sub-Saharan Africa (developing only)",
"Upper middle income", "World"
),;
#delimit cr

Is there any smarter way to do that?

[Rich Goldstein]

break your "inlist" into several with "or" (|) between them; as the documentation says, when your items are strings, the total number of elements per inlist can be no more than 10

[Nick Cox]

Put the acceptable names in a different dataset as a string variable. Then merge with your main dataset. In Stata

search baum, author faq

to find an FAQ explaining.

[Yasin Kantar]

Thank you very much!

[Arthur Morris]

To do what Rich Goldstein suggests, I would first split the list of strings into lists of less than 10 elements:

// local for the first group
local colist1 `" "Arab World", "Caribbean small states", "Central Europe and the Baltics", "East Asia & Pacific (all income levels)", "East Asia & Pacific (developing only)", "Euro area", "Europe & Central Asia (all income levels)", "Europe & Central Asia (developing only)", "Europe and Central Asia (IFC classification)", "European Union", "Fragile and conflict affected situations" "'
// local for the second group
local colist2 `" "Heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC)", "High income", "High income: nonOECD", "High income: OECD", "Latin America & Caribbean (all income levels)", "Latin America & Caribbean (developing only)", "Latin America and the Caribbean (IFC classification)", "Least developed countries: UN classification", "Low & middle income" "'
// local for the third group
local colist3 `" "Low income", "Lower middle income", "Middle East & North Africa (all income levels)", "Middle East & North Africa (developing only)", "Middle income", "North America", "OECD members", "Other small states", "Pacific island small states" "'
local colist4 `" "Small states", "South Asia", "Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)", "Sub-Saharan Africa (developing only)", "Upper middle income", "World" "'
// now pass each list to a separate inlist as Rich suggested.
gen aggregate = inlist(countryname,`colist1') | inlist(countryname,`colist2') | inlist(countryname,`colist3') | inlist(countryname,`colist4')

Note that the error Expression too long means that you've passed too many arguments to the function, not (as I first assumed) that any of the individual arguments is too long.

[Bernardo Forbes Costa]

Arthur Morris thanks for you solution.

[Chen Samulsion]

Matteo Pinna wrote a command -inlist2- which can create an inlist() dummy and without inlist() limitations. A link: https://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s458920.html
https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...st2-in-my-code