st: Preventing -infix- from trimming string variables

[Ron�n Conroy <rconroy@rcsi.ie>]

I am doing a nightmare task, which entails cleaning up almost 3,000 
individual files, each one of which represents data on a single study 
participant. The datafiles contain a myriad of oddities, some of which 
appears to be corruption, which I have gradually winnowed out (OS X 
users might like to know that Textalchemy is free, and does a splendid 
job of cleaning corrupted text files...)

However, my next step is to read the files, one at a time, into Stata, 
do some more polishing and write ASCII files. There is a reason for this 
intermediate step, and it's too tedious to explain, but basically I'm 
reading the participant's data file as if it were a series of one-line 
records, eliminating blank lines and trimming duplicate information.

But here's the problem: I'm using a simple dictionary file

infix dictionary {
str var1 1-80
}

However, when Stata reads in the data, it trims trailing spaces off the 
lines. Actually, leading and trailing spaces are important, as this is 
fixed format data, with varying line lengths. But try as I may, I cannot 
get Stata to read the entire line including leading and trailing blanks. 
Any ideas?

The website of the group which developed the original package was last 
updated in 1999, and I'm told they don't answer email any more, which is 
why I have been landed with this pack of puppies...

--

Ronan M Conroy (rconroy@rcsi.ie) 
Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics 
Royal College of Surgeons 
Dublin 2, Ireland 
+353 1 402 2431 (fax 2764) 
-------------------- 
Just say no to drug reps 
http://www.nofreelunch.org/

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