Including Quote Characters in STATA Calls from MATA

[Samuel Van Gorden]

Is there a way to include quote characters when passing variables from MATA to STATA? For instance, if I have

mata:
a = "ABC"
stata(sprintf("gen b=%s", a))

I want the STATA code that is executed to be:

gen b="ABC"

But it is currently:

gen b=ABC

I have tried including the quotes in sprintf() by escaping with \, but this does not work.

[Joseph Coveney]

Try something like the following.

. local line_size `c(linesize)'

. set linesize 80

. mata:
------------------------------------------------- mata (type end to exit) ------
: argument = char(34) + "ABC" + char(34)

: sprintf("generate str b = %s", argument)
generate str b = "ABC"

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

. set linesize `line_size'

.

[William Lisowski]

Compound double quotation marks apparently work in Mata as they do in Stata.

. mata:
------------------------------------------------- mata (type end to exit) ------
: argument = `""ABC""'

: sprintf("generate str b = %s", argument)
  generate str b = "ABC"

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

.

See

help m2_exp##remarks5

[daniel klein]

Use st_addvar() and st_sstore() for the particular example. In general, calling Stata from Mata is rather slow and - as you have observed - sometimes inconvenient.