Making systematic changes to set of do-files

[Antoine Bonent]

I have a large number of do-files that I would like to run by systematically changing parts of the code.

Changes I want to make:

keep [varlist]

changed to

keep [other varlist]

as well as

save file_name

changed to

save other_file_name

Ideally, I would like to find a solution such that I can loop over all do-files, with the do-files being executed with the aforementioned changes

forvalues i =1/100 {

[run with the mentioned changes] do_file_`i'

}

[Nick Cox]

You could read in each do-file as one string variable and make changes to that string variable and export accordingly.

[Nick Cox]

.... but much, much better technique is to allow your do-file to take arguments. That's all in https://www.stata.com/manuals/u16.pdf

[Mike Lacy]

I agree with Nick that doing this via arguments given to do-files would be a nicer approach, but I can imagine a situation in which that would be onerous. I'm supposing that Antoine's do files are numerous, are already written, and vary sufficiently that making them into one do-file with small variations depending on the command-line arguments would not be easy. If this is the case, I think the "use a string variable" approach, while something of a hack, would be justified by the time saved. This approach would use the too-little known -fileread()- and -filewrite()- functions in Stata. I'm thinking of something like this (not tested, since I don't have good example material):

clear
set obs 1
gen strL dofile = "" // Probably needs to be a strL
gen b = .
local oldlist = "cat dog"
local newlist = "cat dog frog"
local filelist: dir "SomeDirectory" files *.do"
foreach file of local filelist {
  replace dofile = fileread("`file'")
  // Spaces in oldlist would be a problem for subinstr(), as would varying
  // ordering of variables within oldlist, but that *could* be fixed here.
  replace dofile = subinstr(dofile, "`oldlist'", "`newlist'", .)
  tempfile temp
  replace b = filewrite("`temp'", dofile)
  di "*****"Running -`file'- with varlist = `newlist'*****", _newline(2)
  do "`temp'"
  erase "`temp'" // filewrite() won't overwrite

}

[Antoine Bonent]

This is awesome. Thank you so much!