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st: RE: Stored decimals


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: RE: Stored decimals
Date   Wed, 1 Mar 2006 13:03:49 -0000

You shouldn't need to -round(,)-. This is 
a standard precision issue (-search precision, faq-) 
and the presentation problem should be soluble using -format-. 

Thus we need to know in what sense that "doesn't work". 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Siyam, Amani
 
> I am dealing with survey data that avails children weights in kgs (int
> %8.0g). The way the weight variable is provided is without decimal
> places as a three digit number, the last digit representing the 1st
> decimal place, that is the variable has to be divided by 10 before it
> can be used for the necessary calculations.
> 
> I used the command:
> 
> 	gen  tweight=weight/10
> 
> The way the variable "tweight" is stored is critical to the subsequent
> user of my programme and rather annoying because I don't understand
> where the extra decimal places are coming from.  Below is an 
> example of
> the pattern of how the 1 decimal place 
> 
> DHS weight		 True tweight		Stata-stored tweight
> 30				3.0			3.0
> 31				3.1			3.0999999
> 32				3.2			3.2		
> 33				3.3			3.3000002
> 34				3.4			3.4000001
> 35				3.5			3.5
> 36				3.6			3.5999999
> 37				3.7			3.7
> 38				3.8			3.8	
> 39				3.9			3.9000001
> 
> When you summarise the variable tweight, it neatly displays as a
> 1-decimal place variable.
> 
>     Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
> -------------+--------------------------------------------------------
>      tweight |      2686    8.617238    3.959973        1.5       80.7
> 
> I tried the common formatting commands but none seem to be working:
> 
> 	gen float tweight=weight
> 	repl tweight=round(tweight, 0.1)
> 	format tweight %9.1f
> 

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