Nested locals in some commands

[Summer Xavier]

I constructed two locals, for instance, department and major , to show one's information:

local department ""School of Economics" "Quantitive Economics"" 
local major ""Macroeconomics" "Monetary Policy""

With the combination of these two locals, a nested local, info, was established:

local info "`department' `major'"

I want to save the data in memory using the information contained in local info as file name, so I wrote:

save "`info'"

But it did not work. What's wrong with my code? Thanks

[Maarten Buis]

local a1 "foo"
local a2 "bar"

forvalues i = 1/2 {
    di "`a`i''"
}

So the local macro `i' is created in the forvalues loop, containing 1 in the first round and 2 in the second round. So in the first round Stata sees `a`i'', it first evaluates the inner macro `i' to 1, then it sees `a1', and evaluates that to foo.

Is that what you are looking for?

[Maarten Buis]

The problem is the quotes, you cannot have quotes in a file name.

I assume that this is part of a loop, and you want to save many datasets. You could make this approach work. However, you will end up with very long file names, which are a pain to use. Typically I would just use consecutive numbers, maybe two sets of consecutive numbers: one for department and one for major. I would then label the data (keeping in mind the limit of 80 characters), and add additional information using notes (see help label and help notes).

[Summer Xavier]

Thanks bro! !
De facto, I came up with this example for I encountered a data importing problem in which I had a few excel files with several spreadsheets in them. I wanted to write a code to import these spreadsheets and name them with their spreadsheets' file names. for example, an excel file named ExcelFile with SheetA, SheetB and SheetC in it. I want to name the subfile SheetA with the name ExcelFile-SheetA.dta. The example I posted previously was just an abstraction.

[Summer Xavier]

Your suggestion that recording information by Stata's notes and label and naming the file with number is a very good idea! You really helps me a lot!!

[daniel klein]

[...]I encountered a data importing problem in which I had a few excel files with several spreadsheets in them. I wanted to write a code to import these spreadsheets

Your suggestion that recording information by Stata's notes and label and naming the file with number is a very good idea!

For these and related tasks, also see xls2dta (SSC).

Best
Daniel

[Summer Xavier]

Thank you very much!!