Joseph Coveney ([email protected]) wanted to know if it
was possible for leading and trailing spaces to be retained when
importing fixed-width ASCII files:
> How can significant unimbedded spaces of string variables be retained when
> importing fixed-width ASCII files?
>
> -infile- with a dictionary truncates both the leading and trailing spaces of
> string variables. An example of when this is inappropriate is illustrated
> below. The example is a toy of a real data-management task in which
> long-string variables are read into Stata (in pieces that are 244 characters
> or less) from fixed-width ASCII files, manipulated as needed using Stata,
> and then exported to an ODBC-compliant application where they are
> reassembled by concatenation using SQL.
>
> -infix- does the same truncation.
While Joseph and others have discussed some workarounds, there is
currently no elegant way to do this in Stata. We will add one in
a future executable update.
-infile- with a dictionary accepts 's' as a format specifier to read a
set number of string characters. Pieces of text brought in with 's'
have leading and trailing blanks stripped. Joseph's example
dictionary used this:
> ----------------begin Mary.dct-----------------
> infile dictionary using Mary.dat {
> _firstlineoffile(2)
> str5 a_01 %5s
> str5 a_02 %5s
> str5 a_03 %5s
> str5 a_04 %5s
> str5 a_05 %5s
> str5 a_06 %5s
> str5 a_07 %5s "I'm all blank; -drop- me"
> str2 line %2s "I'm a number; -destring- me"
> }
> ------------------end Mary.dct-----------------
We will introduce 'S' as an additional format specifier in a future
executable update. After that, coding
str5 a_01 %5S
in an -infile- dictionary would tell Stata to read 5 string characters,
preserving leading and trailing blanks. Coding
str5 a_01 %5s
would preserve the current behavior, telling Stata to read 5 string
characters, removing leading and trailing blanks.
Alan
([email protected])
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