Stata Display

The display command prints text to the output.

Usage

display "Hello, world"

// arithmetic
display _N+1

// scalars
display "There are " _N " cases"

// stored results
display "Something about `r(N)' of them"

// macros
display "Something about ${globals} and `locals'"

Directives

The display command also understands a set of directives that add macrotized output.

The _newline directive prints a newline character. The _newline(N) directive prints N of them.

the _continue directive suppresses the automatic newline character that follows a display command.

The _skip(N) directive moves the cursor forward N characters, effectively printing N space characters.

The _char(N) directive prints the character corresponding to ASCII or Windows-1252 codepoint N. This is useful for showing characters that would otherwise need to be escaped, or for Windows-1252 codepoints that should instead be encoded in Unicode for display.

display "Backticks look like " _char(96)
display "The British Pound sign looks like " _char(163)

The _column(N) directive moves the cursor to the Nth columnar position. (Consider the start of a line to be the 1st position.) This is useful for creating columnar output, like:

display "1st 2nd 3rd"
display "--- --- ---"
display "1" _column(5) "11" _column(9) "111"
display "999" _column(5) "99" _column(9) "9"

Styling

By default, display will print as plain text. To print with a bolded style, try:

display as result "Something about `r(N)' of them"

To print with a red color, try:

display as error "Something about `r(N)' of them"

These styles continue to be applied until a new one is set, so if using them, adjust all 'normal' display commands to display as text.

See also

Stata manual for display

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