Dear Elmar,
Carriage returns can be very difficult to deal with. I don't have any clear
answers, except to say that I have found a good text editor to be invaluable
for cleaning a file. For instance, with my text editor (TextWrangler) I can
change between UNIX, Windows and Mac carriage returns and I can use grep
functions to find and replace symbols like the carriage return. If you can
export your data from Access as a text file (csv) and then clean it within a
text editor, then this might be a good solution.
I am not sure what computer system or text editor you are using at present,
but some very good advice on text editors is given here.
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/textEditors.html
Good luck,
-- Matt
[email protected]
On 18/6/09 5:28 PM, "Elmar Saathoff" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear list members,
>
> I am frequently using data that were imported from PDAs via MsAccess. In
> some cases these data contain some little squares that do not seem to do
> much harm in Stata, but that other applications interpret as
> linebreaks/carriage returns/paragraph marks, which is quite a hassle. It
> seems that these things are inadvertently entered into the PDAs by the
> people collecting the data. Unfortunately I cannot show them in this
> email, because my email client also interprets them as carriage returns.
> Anyway, I have been trying to identify and get rid of these things by
> programming (using "subinstr", "egen...split" etc.), but unfortunately,
> whatever I do, Stata also interprets them as carriage returns, both in
> do files and in the command window, even if I change the delimiter to
> ";" via the delimit command.
>
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance, Elmar
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