egen, group, label - "r(132), too few quotes"

[Francisco Nobre]

Hello,

I have a string variable, to which I would like to assign numerical values. It has too many unique values to use encode, so I have used:
egen numerical_variable=group(string_variable), label

However, when I do this I get the error "too few quotes r(132)". Does anyone know how to get around this?
Thank you

[Nick Cox]

Hard to say without any data example.

help limits 

tells me that the number of distinct value labels allowed is 65536 and as the same limit applies to labels defined within an egen function as to those defined by encode I don't understand why you think you have a work-around there. But if you omit the label option you will get your numeric variable.