Export Mata string matrix to Stata and Excel

[aaguilar]

Hello
I'm working with string and numeric vectors in mata, and I need to export them to Excel. For numeric vectors, I use the matrix conversion to Stata and then the putexcel command, but for the string case I don't know what to do, because Stata does not admit "string" vectors. So, any help will be welcome!
Best

[Joseph Coveney]

Can't you pass the string vector directly from Mata via its xl() class? In Stata's command line, type

help mf_xl

for further information.

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

You may use -getmata- to turn the Mata matrix into a Stata dataset, then use -export excel-, for example

. mata:
------------------------------------------------- mata (type end to exit) ------
: 
: A = J(3, 2, "test")

: 
: A
          1      2
    +---------------+
  1 |  test   test  |
  2 |  test   test  |
  3 |  test   test  |
    +---------------+

: 
: end
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

. 
. getmata (var*) = A

. 
. list

     +-------------+
     | var1   var2 |
     |-------------|
  1. | test   test |
  2. | test   test |
  3. | test   test |
     +-------------+

. 
. export excel using test.xlsx, replace
file test.xlsx saved

.

[Bruce McDougall]

I came up with a good solution to this problem. You can use the colnames/rownames function, which lets you give your Stata matrix column and row names (in string!). If your exist matrix has these already, simply create a blank matrix and use the function purely to get a bunch of text into a matrix.

In my application I made a blank (empty) matrix of the correct dimensions, and then gave the headings I needed. For example, I wanted to place the text "count count mean mean median median" above 6 of my columns, and paste a different matrix (with its own headings) below.

My code looked like this:

matrix colempty=J(1,6,.)
matrix colnames colempty=count count mean mean median median
putexcel a1=matrix(colempty), colnames