Re: st: Help with destring

[Ted Anagnoson <anag999@silcom.com>]

When I have numbers that are strings, I almost always have good luck with 
the "real" function, rather than encode/decode or destring, etc.  If 
someone said this and I missed it, I apologize....

For version 9, it is in the D Manual, Data Management, under functions, p. 170.

Ted Anagnoson


At 02:31 AM 7/11/2007 +0900, Joseph Coveney wrote:

> Donald Spady wrote:
>
> I have data that are string data and want to convert them to numeric.  I
> would expect destring to do this but it doesn't.  For example, here is a
> table
>  tab Worker_Type
>
> worker  Freq. Percent Cum.
>
> Administration 12 9.16 9.16
> Allied 44 33.59 42.75
> Attending 26 19.85 62.60
> Clerk 9 6.87 69.47
> Med Student 17 12.98 82.44
> Resident/Fellow 23 17.56 100.00
>
> Total 131 100.00
>
> The values are all strings.
> When I do
> Destring worker, generate(nworker)
> I get the message
> destring worker, gen(nworker)
> worker contains nonnumeric characters; no generate
> r; t=0.02 10:31:13
>
> It seems to me that if I want to convert a string, that implicitly means
> there are nonnumeric characters.  What am I doing wrong?  I am using
> Stata10.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Roughly stated, -destring- converts string numerals into numerical data.
> It's not clear what you're expecting the numerical data version of worker
> to be, but it seems as if you want something like -encode-.
>
> Joseph Coveney
>
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