nbstata compiles document but does not work in interactive mode in quarto documents (in RStudio) about nbstata HOT 5 OPEN

Thank you for the quick reply. Although that is not the exact issue, it did point me in the right direction. I am not very familiar with quarto but it does seem that in interactive mode, knitr is doing the job of executing the cells. I'll try to illustrate the issue here, as it might be helpful to others (or at least me in the future!)

It seems that knitr creates a temporary sh file with the following content and tries to call that from the default shell.

{engine} /tmp/tempfilename.txt

So it enters Stata in normal (not batch mode) and it never returns any output or error until I cancel the call via the stop button, when I can then see Stata's splash and the error (/ is not a valid command). See, for example, if I rename the engine to something random:

Having said that, there is indeed a knitr engine called stata. So I don't know why that is not being called. I did set jupyter (and nbstata as the kernel) when creating the document (see next screenshot).

Having said all that, it is very likely that the issue is either with quarto or with knitr. I'll try to figure it out, and I'll link back to this issue any relevant info I find.

By the way (not relevant to this issue) I also opened an issue in quarto's repository asking about support for nbstata. Is there any documentation on using nbstata with quarto (from VSCode or any other editor?).

from nbstata.

One possible workaround would be setting a custom knitr engine and trying to make sure it points to python (jupyter) and uses nbstata. (here for context: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/custom-engine.html)

Disclaimer: that I have a very shallow understanding of how knitr and jupyter kernels work.

And here is a minumum reproducible example of a document.

---
title: "nbstata"
format: html
jupyter: nbstata
---

## nbstata 

```{stata}
di 1 + 1 
```

Note that the document does not include the usual knitr setup chunk that a Rmarkdown usually includes.

from nbstata.

That's great that quarto is now supporting nbstata! I just did a quick test with simple documents, and it ran fine on VSCode (interactive execution and compilation).

On RStudio the conflict between the default stata engine (from knitr) and nbstata via jupyter is still present. However! I found out a few weeks ago that due to Fedora's packaging guidelines, quarto is not bundled-up with RStudio as distributed by Fedora (see: rstudio/rstudio#12609). So I am not sure if the conflict is only in Fedora distributions or a more generic issue.

In any case, a quarto document with nbstata kernel can be compiled with quarto::quarto_render("file.qmd") from R or with quarto render file.qmd from the terminal. The source file can be edited from RStudio but (at least in my system) interactive code execution does not work. If I get the chance to play with another distribution, I'll make sure to test it and report back.

from nbstata.

Thank you for reporting. I think that when you run stata interactively in RStudio, it's not actually using nbstata.[1] I bet you're using the knitr version of Stata instead (about which I only have a vague awareness). Maybe Stata 18 broke something about how knitr stata worked? I think you should instead report this to the knitr project (but do report back if you would).[2]

By contrast, according to my hypothesis, when you render using Quarto, it is using nbstata and working.

[1] One clue is that the Stata "splash," that several-line display of the Stata version and so on, is disabled by default in nbstata. It's also hard for me to imagine how nbstata could trigger an error like that.
[2] An additional piece of info that may be helpful to them is the Stata revision date.

from nbstata.

Thank you, @avila, for that quarto issue which led to nbstata support in the Quarto VSCode extension.

I'd like to add further documentation directing people toward that extension (and also how to use nbstata with RStudio if there is a way), but I won't have time to work on it myself until July at the earliest.

from nbstata.