I guess that everything here hinges on the fact that -outsheet-
emits decimal representations of what are held internally
within Stata as binary numbers. See [U] 16.10 as normal.
Also, I think it's fair to say that -outsheet- is not
best suited for this purpose.
If you can get your mainframe to read in hexadecimal, then
formatting your non-integers as %21x will I think reduce
the problem. A customised program using -file- might
be another possibility.
Nick
[email protected]
Sascha O. Becker
> in a project, we have to -outsheet- a Stata data set, and after some
> intermediate steps on a mainframe computer, -insheet- the data again.
>
> When doing some tests with -outsheet- and -insheet- it turns out that
> after insheeting variables and comparing them to the original
> variables
> using Stata's -compare-, values differ. Here is what I do:
>
> ***
> /* data set contains variables var1 and id */
> save using original.dta
> outsheet using test.csv, comma
> insheet using test.csv, clear
> rename var1 var1_new
> merge id using original
> compare var1 var1_new;
>
> ---------- difference ----------
> count minimum average maximum
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> var1<var1_new 89433 -.0005035 -.000129 -7.45e-09
> var1=var1_new 6097
> var1>var1_new 89019 7.45e-09 .0001295 .0005035
> ----------
> jointly defined 184549 -.0005035 -7.35e-08 .0005035
> ----------
> total 184549
> ***
>
> Admittedly, the differences are not large. Is there a way to
> make sure
> values do NOT change AT ALL after outsheet - insheet?
>
> One remark: the problem only seems to come up with floats and doubles
> but not with integers.
>
> Does -outsheet- work for integers (and bytes) only?
>
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