st: binary format type str question

[Mark Fisher <mark@markfisher.net>]

Hi. I'm writing a Mathematica program to read stata "dta" files. I have 
the "Stata help for dta" page, which is quite useful. Everything seems 
to work fine as long as the data types are in the range 251 to 255 
(byte, int, long, float, or double). But I can't figure out how to 
properly read the data when the data types are in the range 1 to 244 
(str1, str2, ... str244). BTW, I have no trouble reading the "char" 
strings for the data_label and the time_stamp; I just read them in as a 
list of bytes, discard the bytes starting with the first zero, and 
convert the remaining bytes to ascii. But the str types don't seem be 
the same sort of beast. Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.

--Mark.
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