qui and quietly are the same command? but "quietly" brings syntax error

[su lee]

Hello everyone,

I am leaning stata by following already made "do foles"
The command below works fine. But as I replace qui with "quietly" (as I believe these two are the same command), it brings an error msg : "invalid syntax"
Could you please explain me what is wrong?

PS. would you recommend other good sources to learn stata - I want to learn by replicating already made do files - or if there is any other good ways to learn.
Thanks a lot!

qui {
rename State state_old
gen state =.
replace state = 00 if state_old==99
label define state_lbl 00 "notdefined" 01 "somewhere" 01 "delhi" ///
label value state state_lbl
}

[Marcos Almeida]

Hello Su,

The Stata Manuals are always a great starting point.

Below, an example, demonstrating that qui and quiet give the same results:

 
. sysuse auto.dta
(1978 Automobile Data)

. qui regress mpg foreign

. estimates store model1

. quietly regress mpg foreign

. estimates store model2

. estimates table model1 model2

----------------------------------------
    Variable |   model1       model2    
-------------+--------------------------
     foreign |  4.9458042    4.9458042  
       _cons |  19.826923    19.826923  
----------------------------------------

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Su:
welcome to the list.
The error message may be caused by an inconsistency in your code, which has nothing to do with -quietly- or -quite- :

label define state_lbl 00 "notdefined" 01 "somewhere" 01 "delhi" ///
label value state state_lbl

should be:

label define state 00 "notdefined" 01 "somewhere" 01 "delhi" ///
label value state state

[Nick Cox]

I don't think the quietly (qui) is the problem here at all.

 
label define state_lbl 00 "notdefined" 01 "somewhere" 01 "delhi" ///
label value state state_lbl

is doubly problematic. You are trying to define a label for 1 with two different labels. And the label value command must be on a new line: the continuation comment makes it illegal.

Note that the leading zeros (i.e. 00 rather than 0 and 01 rather than 1) will just be ignored. Demonstration:

. label def something 00 "zero" 01 "one"

. label li something
something:
           0 zero
           1 one

[Nick Cox]

Carlo:

We posted at the same time.

There would be nothing wrong with

label define state_lbl 00 "notdefined" 01 "delhi"  
label value state state_lbl

See #4 for my diagnosis.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Nick:
thanks for the helpful insight.
My bad: I usually double click on the same variable for label creation and never considered different approaches.
However, it sounds weird that the original poster reports a problem with -quietly- only: perhaps she may be willing to clarify in a next message.

[Nick Cox]

Carlo: What was reported doesn't surprise me. quietly suppresses output but not error messages. So, you don't necessarily get to see which command inside the block is wrong.

Try this:

quietly { 
   sysuse auto, clear
   regress mpg weight 
   display "Carlo is a nice guy" 
   regress make mpg 
}

The error comes from the last command, but it takes extra knowledge to know which command is the problem.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Nick:
thanks for the clarification via a flattering toy-code!

[Roshni Manwani]

I have been having the same issue with the command quietly quietly {
forvalues i=1(1) `mc' {
preserve
clear
set obs 500
gen x1=rnormal()*1+1
gen x2=rnormal()*2+2
gen u=rnormal()
gen y=1+2*x1+5*x2+u
reg y x1 x2
local x1coef=_b[x1]
local x2coef=_b[x2]
local const=_b[_cons]
restore
replace data_store_x1=`x1coef' in `i'
replace data_store_x2=`x2coef' in `i'
replace data_store_cons=`const' in `i'
}
}

this is my code and I have been getting the quietly { syntax error

[Jared Greathouse]

the quietly { syntax error

Doesn't mean much to me, what's the error code you're getting? Does the code work when you take away quietly?

[Nick Cox]

Where is local macro mc defined?