inlist alternatives?

[Pratap Pundir]

inlist seems to have a very small limit for the number of arguments /size of list it can take.
i'd like to use it in a keep statement, hence looking for alternatives that can take larger lists...i want to keep about 50 vars from among 450...so, while if..or is an option, it's not very palatable.

[Clyde Schechter]

Well, I agree with you that the limit of ten string arguments in -inlist()- is rather confining, and I do hope that in future versions of Stata that will be relaxed. That said, however, I fail to see the relevance of -inlist()- to "i want to keep about 50 vars from among 450." To -keep- those 50 variables you just develop a local macro containing the names of the 50 variables and then refer to that in your -keep- statement. There is no way I can think of to use -inlist()- here. What am I missing?

[Pratap Pundir]

Ah, fair point. Never used a local like that, but makes sense.

[Pratap Pundir]

I tried

local countries2remove `""ASM","CHI","CUW","DJI","ERI","FRO","GIB","GUM","IMN","LBR","LIE","MAF","MCO","MNE","MNP","NCL","NRU","PLW","PRI","PRK","PSE","PYF","QAT","SMR","SOM","SRB","SSD","STP","SXM","SYR","TCA","TLS","VGB","VIR","XKX""'
drop if inlist(countrycode,`countries2remove')

But getting

expression too long

[Clyde Schechter]

With strings, -inlist()- only allows a maximum of 10 arguments. Since you have, I believe, 35 countries there, you will have to break this up into 4 groups, each containing 9 of the countries (8 in the last one) and do separate inlist() functions for those.

[Nick Cox]

See also the FAQ

FAQ . . . . . . . . . . . Defining group characteristics to create subsets
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. F. Baum
7/11 How do you efficiently define group characteristics
in your data in order to create subsets?

https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/d...s-for-subsets/

[Pratap Pundir]

With strings, -inlist()- only allows a maximum of 10 arguments.

Yes, that was the whole reason to use the local macro instead of the actual list of variables...

To -keep- those 50 variables you just develop a local macro containing the names of the 50 variables and then refer to that in your -keep- statement.

Turns out, I misunderstood this.