SFIToolkit.execute and multiple lines commands

[jerome falken]

Regardless if using Python or Java, I can easily do SFIToolkit.ExecuteCommand("di 1+1",0) or SFIToolkit.stata("di 1+1",0) and either one works perfectly.
But how would that work with multiline inputs? I've tried various combinations, i.e.:

doesn't work:

SFIToolkit.stata("forvalues i=1/100 {",0);
SFIToolkit.stata("di 1+1",0);
SFIToolkit.stata("}",0);

doesn't work:

SFIToolkit.stata("forvalues i=1/100 {\ndi 1+1\n}",0);

I've tried variations around that, but I couldn't find a way to execute multilines commands with either the Java or Python sdk, maybe the method isn't documented, please help; thank you.

J.

[William Lisowski]

Regarding your second approach, is your \n is being escaped into a newline by Python and Java? (I'm neither a Python nor Java user.) And if not, I doubt that the SFIToolkit.stata method does so.

In Stata, I would construct the string to contain newlines with the following

"forvalues i=1/100 {`=char(10)'di 1+1`=char(10)'}"

to get the hex 0A (decimal 10) newline character substituted into the string, but I don't know how to do that in Python or Java.

[jerome falken]

Hmmm, that's a very good idea, but it didn't work, (in python/java or on the stata "console", at least on linux) neither did this:

"forvalues i=1/100 {`=char(13)'`=char(10)'di 1+1`=char(13)'`=char(10)'}"

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I've no experience with Stata and Python, so disregard this if it doesn't make sense. If in Python, aren't multiline strings constructed with triple quotes (""")? Perhaps that is needed here.

Alternatively, you might try placing the continue line operator (///) where linebreaks are intended.

[jerome falken]

I tried triple quotes (in java and python), I also tried #delimit, and I finally tried /// but I suspect the two last options only apply to do-files.
Neither worked.

[Bjarte Aagnes]

You could write Stata commands to a tempfile to be run. In the following example running python "interactive" from Stata the local must be escaped, this should not be the case if saving as a python script file to be run via -python script-

python :

from sfi import SFIToolkit

tempfile = SFIToolkit.getTempFile()

stcmd = '''
forvalues i=1/5 {
    di \`i'
}
'''
f = open(tempfile, "w")
f.write(stcmd)
f.close()

stcmd = "do " + tempfile
 
SFIToolkit.stata(stcmd, True)

end

[jerome falken]

Yes, I was trying to avoid that... because if I have to do that for a lot of stata commands, then it's just spaghetti code... It works if you have *one* isolated case, but it's not something that's going to scale right.
There's got to be a better way to handle that...

[William Lisowski]

I would think that python code like the following

mystata("""
    forvalues i=1/100 {
        di 1+1",0);
    }
""")

where mystata() encapsulates the process of acquiring a temporary file, writing its argument out to that file, and then submitting the file using the SFIToolkit.stata command would not be too spaghetti-like.

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

For calling Stata from Python with a block of Stata commands, in Stata 17, see [37] in https://www.stata.com/python/pystata...-API-functions

[jerome falken]

Thank you Hua