What is wrong is that you are asking -destring-
to do something that
1. it was not designed to do
and (more importantly)
2. it finds impossible to do.
-destring- needs to find _numeric_ content
in a variable and to be told to ignore
all the non-numeric content; otherwise
it can do nothing. Moreover, you may have
some preference that "N" means 0 or 1 or
some other value, but nowhere did you
tell Stata this.
No matter, it is likely that
-encode- will work for you.
Nick
[email protected]
Jia Xiangping
>
> Additionally, when I run -
> . destring v1, generate(vv1) float
>
> I was informed that
> v1 contains non-numeric characters; no generate
>
> What's wrong?
> > When data were input from questionnaires, epidata (version3.1) was
> > used. One question, as "Did you applied credit last year",
> was set as
> > "Boolean (yes/no)" in Epidata. But when data was exported to Stata
> > 8.2, the result is very frustrating:
> >
> > -des v1, detail-
> >
> > storage display value
> > variable name type format label variable label
> >
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
> > v1 str1 %1s
> 1) did you
> > apply for a credit
> >
> in 2004
> >
> > -sum v1, detail-
> >
> > 1) did you apply for a credit in 2004
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> > no observations
> >
> > -list v1-
> >
> > +----+
> > | v1 |
> > |----|
> > 1. | N |
> > 2. | N |
> > 3. | N |
> > 4. | N |
> > 5. | N |
> > |----|
> > 6. | N |
> > 7. | N |
> > 8. | N |
> > 9. | N |
> > 10. | N |
> > |----|
> > 11. | N |
> > 12. | N |
> > 13. | N |
> > 14. | N |
> > 15. | N
> >
> > What I need is just a binary variable. Must I have to
> transform it to
> > numerical variable firstly and then label variables and values again
> > manually? Are there any other ways I can apply?
> >
> > If I could foresee this problem, I would have defined variable v1 as
> > just numerical type in Epidata instead of "Boolean".
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