Colleagues: My objective is to store a string-valued variable in Stata using some Mata code. One of the characters I want to include in the string is "•" (I'm not sure of its ASCII/Unicode value; it's alt-8 on a Mac keyboard).

I'm having difficulty doing this using st_store although getmata seems to work fine. Here's a simplified example
Code:
clear

set obs 5

gen str1 s1=""

mata: z=J(5,1,"•")
mata: st_sstore(.,"s1",z)

getmata z

list s1 z
This returns:
Code:
     +---------+
     | s1   z  |
     |---------|
  1. |  �   • |
  2. |  �   • |
  3. |  �   • |
  4. |  �   • |
  5. |  �   • |
     +---------+
I can certainly proceed using getmata but I'm wondering if anyone has an idea why st_sstore doesn't seem to work here while getmata does. Thanks in advance.