Re: st: trim spaces in postcode

[Ronnie Babigumira <rb.glists@gmail.com>]

Thanks Nick

Nick Cox wrote:
> I have two guesses here. 
> First, -generate- can be smart because
> Stata can look at the expression on the RHS of 
> gen newvar = exp 
> and work out what kind of beast it is. What is more,
> Stata is always going to be correct on this, or else
> you are asking for something illegal. 
> Second, -input- and -infile- historically weren't designed 
> to be smart because it was thought that the user
> could and should specify what variable types were wanted. 
> -insheet- came a fair while later and was more ambitious. 
> It peeks at the first and second lines of the file and
> tries to work out what is going on. Often, it can misunderstand, 
> which is part of the rationale for -destring- and -tostring-,
> which came a wave later yet. 
> In short, -infile- and -input- remain as originally designed 
> on the principle of not fixing what isn't broken. 
> Nick 
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 
> Ronnie Babigumira
>
>
> > Yes I have used and continue to use -insheet- (mainly if I 
> > have tab delimited data from excel) and specifying the string 
> > length is not a problem with -insheet-. That said, there are 
> > situations where -infile- is the appropriate command and of 
> > course -input- is invaluable when I want to input a few 
> > entries. In this case I have to specify the length of string 
> > variables
>  
> Ada Ma 
>
> > > have you tried -insheet-??
> Ronnie Babigumira
>
> > > Is there something in newer versions of Stata that would 
> > save me from guessing the length of strings when using -infile-
> > > and -input- 
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