The user-written commands you download to your ado/plus directory are updated once in a while on that RepEc server they come from. So, after you findit and then net install it, your imported command might need to be refreshed occasionally. That is what adoupdate, update does. I was reminded of this when I tried to [...]

I just read this. I liked it. It put some bit of anguish I've been having into clearer words than I could. My Stata code between 2000 and 2006 consisted exclusively of do-files that put to work either standard Stata commands or user-written commands from the SSC. There was not a single program definition anywhere [...]

My friend Dan Blanchette showed me a little Mata function yesterday that he wrote for changing the case -- lower, upper, proper -- for strings longer than 244 characters. It was fresh in my head today as I went looking for something while babysitting my daughter -- can't remember what; babysitting requires undivided attention -- [...]

I recently worked on a project where I had to model groundwater salinity as an indirect function of population growth. The idea is that more people will draw more fresh water from the aquifer; other things equal, saline water will be displace it. I had to do this for sixteen counties in Southern Florida and [...]

I am reading An Introduction to Stata Programming, by Christopher Baum. He suggests, in Chapter 5.2, a nice do-file method to validate your data: you use pairs of list and assert. For example, suppose you know that a variable v should have no missing values. If it indeed does not, then assert !missing(v) should run [...]

With one variable, that's easy enough: count if missing(variable-name). If you have several variables, you can put them in a foreach loop. But if you have to do this for arbitrary lists of variables in several files, it may be interesting to package that foreach loop inside a quick command that might handle special display [...]

Last week I mentioned that in the course of switching from Notepad++ to Vim I lost the ability to run Stata do-files or selected lines from within the text editor, and I asked my readers for help if they had a solution. What do you know, one of them did, and wrote to me all [...]

When it comes to defining local macros in a different place from where you use them, you have two options: a do-file you include as needed or an r-class program that you call as needed. I talked about it here and said that a program is a better choice, without any evidence to back up [...]

I was looking for an excuse to try something new and I decided to pick on one Notepad++ shortcoming that was handy: the Stata syntax highlighting gets utterly mangled after compound quotes -- `"`like so'"' -- which do sometimes arise, usually in the process of file open/file write.  Vim does not get confused by compound quotes [...]

The other day I wrote a program that needed to call a file as an argument -- with the full file path. My first pass at it was to capture the argument as usual, with say args input_file. But that would not have worked with file paths that have spaces in them. What might have [...]