Unexpected error _lambda invalid name

[Sophia Backhaus]

Hi everyone,

I am having an unexpected error warning "_lambda_varname invalid name".

I am using STATA 17 for mac.

For quick background: I am running meta-regression analyses using the robumeta package.
For the analyses, I centered two continous variables using the mcenter command. This worked fine for both variables and they were saved as new variables.

*Variable 1: dosage_session
mcenter dosage_session

Variable | Obs Mean Std. dev. Min Max
-------------+---------------------------------------------------------
C_dosage_s~n | 3,556 7.08e-16 4.989599 -9.036232 49.96377


*Variable 2: attended_session_perc

mcenter attended_session_perc

Variable | Obs Mean Std. dev. Min Max
-------------+---------------------------------------------------------
C_attended~c | 1,154 -7.45e-17 .193971 -.5968094 .2731906



Here comes my problem:
When I am running the meta-regression analyses I receive an error warning only for the second variable C_attended_session_perc

This is the error:
_forlambda_C_attended_session_perc invalid name

This does not happen with C_dosage_session. I tried renaming the variable to centered_attended_session and the same error occurred --> _lambda_centered_attended_session invalid name
I tried a lot of googling but I haven't found any helpful forum entry, so I am trying statalist for the first time.

Thank you so very much for your help!

All the best,
Sophia

[Nick Cox]

. di strlen("_forlambda_C_attended_session_perc")
34

. di strlen("_lambda_centered_attended_session")
33

Those names are too long. The limit on variable name length is 32 characters, as documented at help limits.

Your renaming should be to something short enough that it can be given prefixes and suffixes.

[Sophia Backhaus]

Wonderful, thank you so very much!