Local macro not working | dataex attached

[Girish Venkataraman]

I am defining a couple of variables as below to be a local macro. But Stata 17 is not recognizing 'cllpred' as a local macro. What am I doing wrong?

Tried:

local cllpred cllcd38f cllzap70
display cllpred
cllpred not found

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* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input float(cllcd38f cllzap70)
0 0
1 1
0 1
. .
. .
1 0
0 0
0 .
1 1
. .
. .
. .
1 1
. .
0 1
. .
. .
. .
1 1
. 0
. .
. .
1 1
1 1
1 .
1 1
1 .
0 .
0 1
0 .
. .
. .
. .
1 0
1 1
. .
. .
1 1
1 0
. .
1 .
0 1
. .
0 1
. 1
. .
. 1
0 .
. .
1 1
. .
1 .
1 .
1 .
. .
1 .
0 .
. .
1 .
. .
. .
. .
1 .
1 .
0 .
1 .
. .
. .
1 .
0 .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
0 1
. .
0 1
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. 1
0 1
1 1
1 1
0 1
1 .
. .
. .
0 .
0 .
1 1
0 0
. .
0 0
end
label values cllzap70 posneglab
label values cllcd38f posneglab
label def posneglab 0 "Negative", modify
label def posneglab 1 "Positive", modify

[Nick Cox]

di "`cllppred'"

There are two pitfalls here side by side.

cllppred without single quotes to Stata should be the name of a variable or scalar. No such entity is known to Stata, hence your error message.

display `cllpred'

would be a step in the right direction, but Stata would evaluate first seeing the variable names inside and then showing their values in observation 1. Not what you want, presumably.

So, you need to specify the double quotes to insist on seeing the contents of the macro, not an evaluation thereof.

There is no question here of a local macro "not working". You created a local macro, but you never referred to it.

[Girish Venkataraman]

Yes. That worked!! Your explanation makes total sense.