Strange error while running reclink

[James Park]

I am using Stata17. I got this error while running reclink.

The code I ran is just standard:

reclink company_name using "usingdata", idmaster(idmaster) idusing(company_number) gen(match_score)

I tested this same code on a tiny sample data. And it works.

But it didn't work on the actual data I work on. Unfortunately, I cannot post the data here because it's proprietary.

This error appeared several hours after running reclink, not right after. If there was an error in the code itself, I'd guess this error message would have appeared quickly. This perplexes me even more about what would have caused this.

When does this error occur?

[Hemanshu Kumar]

It's really hard to diagnose this without the data. My sense is that you have some (Unicode?) strings with special characters (or perhaps even some with quotes or backslashes), which the code in reclink is not robust enough to handle. Perhaps you have a sense whether some strings of this sort exist?

Also, for interested readers: reclink is a community-contributed command available via SSC.

[Rich Goldstein]

if the error message is internal to -reclink-, the easiest way to find the possible causes is to -view- reclink.ado and do a search on the error message; see

h view

if it's possible that it is not from the -reclink- code, use -trace- to find the problem; you may want to set -tracedepth- also; see

h trace

[Hemanshu Kumar]

I checked this earlier; the error is not internal to reclink. So yes, using trace might be one way to go.