Format display decimal

[joan marc]

Hi everyone,

I don't understand why this is not formatting in two decimals

sysuse auto, clear
sum price, meanonly
di r(mean), %9.2f

Thanks

[Nick Cox]

display %9.2f r(mean)

See the help. Where given, formats precede expressions.

[joan marc]

You mean sometimes you have to say the format before the command? In wich occations, then? Thank you nick, Joan

[Nick Cox]

As said, it's explained in the help.

What you are using (see http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?display) is of the form

[%fmt] [=]exp

which means that you can specify a format before an expression (in your case the expression r(mean))

You can put it afterwards, but as you found that format will be ignored unless, in turn, it is followed by another expression.

Unless you learn to read help entries, your progress in Stata will be very slow.

[joan marc]

Hi Nick,

I do read helps and check google before writing in statalist. It is true that even if I am learning I still find help files tricky because lots of things I don't know what they are talking about because I am not an expert and only use stata some times. For example: when I read

help tabulate oneway

I cannot see whether if the format goes before or after the command. I can see it in

help display

instead
I learn more easyly by examples, this is why I think there should be more of them.

Thank for your valuable help and comments

Joan

[Nick Cox]

tabulate oneway doesn't allow format specification, so I do not understand that example.

To the point, display is a slightly complicated command, but in reading the help you can just ignore what makes no sense, and in the case here fmt and exp are clickable keywords.

In essence, the reason I can answer these questions is that ... I read the help and I tried examples. It's the only way.