Programming features

Seewhat's new in programming.

Programming features

• Sophisticated parsing
• Looping and branching
• Markup and control language
• Access to internal system variables
• Binary and text file I/O
• JDBC support
• ODBC/SQL support
• Access to files on the Internet
• List processing
• Path and file utilities
• Extensive set of functions for string and data manipulation, including regular expressions and Unicode
• Window management
• Automation

Object-oriented programming

• Inheritance
• Encapsulation of data structures and programs
• Program-name overloading

Programming utilities for...

• Debugging programs
• Measuring convergence
• Marking relevant sample
• Storing results
• Handling time-series variables
• Confirming variable types
• Controlling display formats
• Parsing factor variables

Menu language

• Add items to existing menus
• Add new menus
• Create dialog interfaces

Long string/BLOB support

• Up to 2,000,000,00-character long strings
• Binary "string" (BLOBs)
• Import entire files into BLOBs/long strings
• Export files from BLOBs/long strings

Unicode support

• UTF-8
• Translation of extended ASCII to UTF-8
• Unicode-aware string functions
• Locale-based sorting and string comparison

Project Manager

• Handle dozens or hundreds of scripts at once
• Portable project file/collections for working on multiple computers or sharing with colleagues

Numerics by Stata

• Create applications with the power of Stata inside them; see theNumerics by Stata page for more information.

Extensibility

• Ability to add new commands to Stata
• Ado: scripting language
• Mata: C/C++ like compiled (byte-code) matrix programming languageUpdated
• Mata: object-oriented programming
• Open development environment: access to the same programming tools StataCorp developers use
• Access to source of many Stata commands and Mata functions
• PyStata — Python integration—call Python directly from StataUpdated
• PyStata module—call Stata directly from Python and Jupyter NotebookUpdated
• Java integration—embed Java code directly in StataUpdated
• Java plugins—create Java libraries for Stata
• Plugins (DLLs or shared objects)
• H2O integration: access H2O from Stata

Reporting—Dynamic document generation

• Convert Word documents to PDF
• Convert HTML (including CSS) files to Word documents
• Create Word documents with embedded Stata code, output, and graphs
• Create HTML files with embedded Stata code, output, and graphs
• Markdown

Reporting—reproducibly create Word, Excel, and PDF files

• High-level creation of Word documents containing Stata results and graphs
• Low-level programmatic access for fine-control creation of Word documents
• High-level creation of PDF files containing Stata results and graphs
• Low-level programmatic access for fine-control creation of PDF files
• High level import/export of full Excel worksheets
• Low-level cell-by-cell access to write results to and read data from Excel, including graphs, formulas, date formats, currency formats, bold, italics, and more.
• Bookmark support inputdocx.
• SVG support inputdocx.

Additional resources

• Programming Reference Manual
• An Introduction to Stata Programming by Christopher F. Baum
• In the Spotlight: Create Word documents: Starring putdocx
• The Stata Blog: A Stata command to run ChatGPT
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 1: Setting up Stata to use Python
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 2: Three ways to use Python in Stata
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 3: How to install Python packages
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 4: How to use Python packages
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 5: Three-dimensional surface plots of marginal predictions
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 6: Working with APIs and JSON data
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 7: Machine learning with support vector machines
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 8: Using the Stata Function Interface to copy data from Stata to Python
• The Stata Blog: Stata/Python integration part 9: Using the Stata Function Interface to copy data from Python to Stata
• The Stata Blog: How to automate common tasks
• The Stata Blog: Programming an estimation command in Stata: A map to posted entries
• More Stata Blog articles on programming
• FAQ: Sharing your new commands with Stata users
• NetCourse 151: Introduction to Stata programming
• NetCourse 251: Writing your own Stata commands
• Reproducible and automated reporting flyer
• Reproducibility and backward compatibility flyer