Ambiguous abbreviation/variable not found errors

[Cherie Saulter]

Hi,

I'm using Stata 15.1 on a Mac. I have been cleaning a dataset with no problem for a few weeks and today I received the following error message:

tab q2_7
q2_7 ambiguous abbreviation
r(111);

After reading some help files I tried:

set varabbrev off

And got this error:

tab q2_7
variable q2_7 not found
r(111);

However, if I type tab in the command field and click on the variable from the variable list, it works.

This is the output when I type des and click on the variable (it also gives me an error if I just type it or try to run from a do file):

des q2_7 

              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
q2_7            str123  %123s               * Q2.7

I would appreciate any thoughts on what the problem might be. Please let me know if I need to provide more information.

[Nick Cox]

Try

describe q2_7*

[Cherie Saulter]

If I do that I get:

des q2_7*

              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
q2_7            str123  %123s               * Q2.7
q2_7_other      str113  %113s               * Q2.7_9_TEXT
q2_7_1          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_2          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_3          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_4          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_5          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_6          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_7          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_8          byte    %8.0g                 
q2_7_9          byte    %8.0g

Is it a problem that the variables have similar names? This is the naming convention I've been using for sub-questions in survey data and haven't had any issues until today.

[Cherie Saulter]

I'm sorry, please disregard my question. It looks like I accidentally typed a space into the do file where I renamed the variable, so it was actually q2_7[space]. Leaving this post in case anyone else encounters the same problem, because I didn't know Stata recognized spaces in variable names.