Backslash character does not collapse.

[Weston Ley]

The F&Q page https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/p...es-and-macros/ states that two consecutive backslashes collapse into a single backslash character. I am unable to reproduce the results shown in this link. When I enter the commands

local x3  "\\\"
di "[`x3']"

Stata returns the string "[\\\]"

[William Lisowski]

Good question. Running the example code in the FAQ you link to on my system confirms your experience.

. local x1  "\"

. local x2  "\\"

. local x3  "\\\"

. local x4  "\\\\"

. 
. di "[`x1']" 
[\]

. di "[`x2']" 
[\\]

. di "[`x3']" 
[\\\]

. di "[`x4']" 
[\\\\]

. 
. about

Stata/SE 17.0 for Mac (Apple Silicon)
Revision 13 Oct 2022

Perhaps someone else here will be able to update the advice from the FAQ.

In any event, this is worth raising with Stata Technical Services at https://www.stata.com/support/tech-support/ since that FAQ is the first result returned by search backslash.