How to prevent collect from escaping Latex characters?

[Clara Daru]

Hello everyone,

I'm exporting some regression results into Latex with etable + collect. I added a few labels as I want them to appear in the .tex file, but the result has the "$" and "_" characters escaped.

Example:

sysuse auto
reg price mpg weight
estimates store first
reg price mpg length
estimates store second
etable, estimates(first second)
collect label levels colname mpg "$\beta_{mpg}$", modify
collect export reg_results, name(ETable) as (tex) replace

The resulting line in the .tex output becomes

\multicolumn{1}{l}{\$\beta\_{mpg}\$} &

Which won't format correctly. Is there any way to prevent the escaping?

I tried
1. Escaping it in the label collect label levels colname mpg "\$\beta\_{mpg}\$", modify --- no difference
2. Looked it up, found a question from someone using esttab, but there is no substitute option for the collect label and collect export commands.

Best,
Clara

[Andrew Musau]

Thanks for the data example. This is a difficult issue. Sometimes you want the dollar sign to be a dollar sign and sometimes you want it to indicate the beginning or end of math mode. Unless you compel the user to escape all dollar signs in the text, you cannot have it both ways. So my guess is that the programmers choose the lesser of two evils. In this case, you can use the command filefilter to address your issue, assuming all dollar signs indicate the beginning or end of math mode. The same logic holds for the underscore.

sysuse auto, clear
reg price mpg weight
estimates store first
reg price mpg length
estimates store second
etable, estimates(first second)
collect label levels colname mpg "$\beta_{mpg}$", modify
collect export reg_results, name(ETable) as (tex) replace
filefilter "reg_results.tex" "reg_results1.tex" , from("\BS$") to("$") replace
filefilter "reg_results1.tex" "reg_results.tex" , from("\BS_") to("_") replace

Res.:

[Michael Smart]

Thanks for that explanation Andrew. But latex users know to escape their dollar signs if they need to. This is a bug in collect export, plain and simple.

[Andrew Musau]

This is a bug in collect export, plain and simple.

Not necessarily, in my opinion. You don't want LaTeX users to have one set of syntax and others a different one. Ideally, if I have "$20" in my output, I want it to display as such when exported and however exported. For example, it displays correctly in a DOCX format. However, in LaTeX, the dollar sign needs to be escaped. The programmers chose to handle this by escaping dollar signs by default, which makes sense. However, this becomes problematic if you are using dollar signs to indicate the start of math mode.

This issue was recently discussed in this thread: https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...etable-command. My suggested workaround is to use

\( \)

instead of

 $ $

to indicate math mode.

[Bjarte Aagnes]

also

\begin{math}…\end{math}