Macro trimming

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Just spent an hour debugging the code which was producing misaligned output until I realized that the code was run under the version control for v8.2.

The following example demonstrates the difference in behavior I have encountered:

version 8.2
local a="    "+string(1,"%8.2f")
display `"`a'"'

version 18.0
local a="    "+string(1,"%8.2f")
display `"`a'"'

The output was:

. version 8.2

. local a="    "+string(1,"%8.2f")

. display `"`a'"'
1.00

. 
. version 18.0

. local a="    "+string(1,"%8.2f")

. display `"`a'"'
    1.00

. 
end of do-file

Note also that under any version of Stata whatever the format is being used ("%8.2f" or "%18.2f", etc) it doesn't make any difference on the resulting macro content, which also came as a surprise.

Clearly once I know where the issue is, it is really no problem to work around it, but finding it was a journey.
Hope this saves some time to someone who experiences the same issue in the future.

Best, Sergiy Radyakin