Ada Ma wrote:
> Hi Statalist,
>
> Is there a way to stop Stata seeing double quotes as delimiters? I
> have data files in txt format, the data is pipe (|) delimited, but the
> people who generated the data also use double quotes (") to specify
> missing variables so I got a large number of pipes with a couple of
> double quotes I find in the txt files.
>
> I can read the data in Stata fine - only if I open up the text files
> and remove all the double quotes before I -insheet- the data with pipe
> specified as the delimiter. If would be nice if I don't have to check
> for double quotes first because it would save me the time opening up
> the data files twice - first for getting rid of double quotes and
> another for reading it into Stata.
>
Without seeing an example I don't understand the problem. It sounds as
though you are using the -delimiter("char")- option, e.g.
insheet using [path/to/your/file/filename], delim("|") clear
So its irrelevant what the people who generated the data used to sepcify
the missing variable (which you indicate to be double quotes), the
delimiter is "|" and is explicitly defined and anything between these
delimiteres is considered by Stata to be a variable.
This may result in some data that is intended to be numeric being read
as string, but you can -destring- or otherwise convert afterwards.
Neil
--
"We should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Anon (not Albert Einstein)
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