local numlist not working for mkspline

[Long Hong]

Hi all,

I am using mkspline to create manually chosen knots for analysis. However, I got an error message if I ran the following code:

cap drop ppcusp*
_pctile earnings, nq(100)
foreach a in 1 5 10 25  50 75 90 95 99 {
    local knlist "`knlist'  " "  r(r`a')"
}
disp `knlist'    // this gives 120.95 793.51001 1783.34 4546.29 8707.8604 14286.59 21961.449 29073.65 57494.488
mkspline ppcusp = wpcaqe, cubic knots(`knlist') displayknots
knots() invalid -- invalid numlist
r(121);

However, if I ran the following code, it works...

mkspline ppcusp = wpcaqe, cubic knots (120.95 793.51001 1783.34 4546.29 8707.8604 14286.59 21961.449 29073.65 57494.488) displayknots

I really hope the approach with locals can work so that I will not need to manually copy and paste the values.

Any suggestions to fix the code will be highly appreciated!

Best,
Long

[Andrew Musau]

EDITED: Consider

local numlist "1 3 5"
di `numlist'
di `"`numlist'"'

Res.:

. local numlist "1 3 5"

. 
. di `numlist'
135

. 
. di `"`numlist'"'
1 3 5

[Long Hong]

Thanks, Andrew Musau!

It does not solve the issue. The issue comes from the numlist for knot of -mkspline-, but not the numlist for -foreach-

[Andrew Musau]

I noticed that. See my edit.