Moving macro lists into Mata vectors

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Supposing I have a local or global macro with a set of numeric or string values, so a list, and I wish to use them in Mata as a vector. Is there a simple way to do that, perhaps with a Mata analogue of -word count- which would allow me to formulate a -for-/-foreach- loop?

To make this concrete, here's a example.

local have_list `" "This is" "my list" "to" "test" "'
mata want = J(1, 0, "")
foreach item of local have_list {
  mac list _item
  mata: item = st_local("item")
  mata: want = want , item
}
mata: want

This bit of code does what I want it to do, and -want- is correct. Is there a better or more direct approach to this task? I have considered -ustrsplit()- but this can't work in all situations, such as in the above when a space can both delimit the list and be present within each item.

[William Lisowski]

Perhaps this will point in a useful direction.

. local have_list `" "This is" "my list" "to" "test" "'

. macro list _have_list
_have_list:      "This is" "my list" "to" "test"

. local com_list : subinstr local have_list `"" ""' `"",""' , all

. macro list _com_list
_com_list:       "This is","my list","to","test"

. mata want = (`com_list')

. mata want
             1         2         3         4
    +-----------------------------------------+
  1 |  This is   my list        to      test  |
    +-----------------------------------------+

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Thank you, William. That's a nice way to tackle the problem.