-describe- counts all variables in the file, not just in the varlist specified

[Mike Lacy]

I just noticed something I didn't anticipate about how -describe- counts the variables in a varlist supplied to it. My apologies for the noise if this is well-known to most users.

-describe- returns in r(k) the number of variables in the entire data set, not the number in the varlist fed to it. I didn't find any documentation that made this clear. It's not a big deal, of course, but the situation in which I encountered it is not a strange use-case: I did something like

describe ThisVar-ThatVar

because I wanted to know the number of variables in the unabbreviated varlist without having to count them by hand. So, while there are other less convenient ways to get that count, -describe- won't help.

[Maarten Buis]

I did not know that. I just checked, this has been true at least for Stata 8 (the earliest Stata I have access to).

I am sure you know, but maybe for other persons reading this thread: One way of doing this is:

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 automobile data)

. unab vars: m*

. display `: word count `vars''
2