Re: st: Getting rid of line-breaks in Data

["Eric A. Booth" <ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu>]

Elmar:

I had a similar issue with an unknown character (it wasn't a box...it  
was a symbol that looked like a em-dash with a dot over it and,  
similar to your situation, acted like a end-of-line character for some  
programs.  I used file filter with some of its patterns for EOL  
characters until one of them knocked it out--solved my issue.

So, you may try all the EOL patterns mentioned in the -filefilter-   
help file:


filefilter oldfile.txt newfile.txt , from(\n) to(\t)




If "\n" doesnt work, try to substitute it with   "\r", "\M", "\W", or  
"\U" or some ASCII characters (you might want to try the ascii  
"\254d", see:  http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/ascii-table-codes/ascii-codes-254.html 
  for more).


Eric

__
Eric A. Booth
Public Policy Research Institute
Texas A&M University
ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu
Office: +979.845.6754
Fax: +979.845.0249





On Jun 18, 2009, at 7:32 PM, Matt Spittal wrote:

> 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
> matt.spittal@cancervic.org.au
>
>
>
>
> On 18/6/09 5:28 PM, "Elmar Saathoff" <elmarsaathoff@gmx.net> 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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>
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