st: Reading and writing Stata data files

[Normand Peladeau <peladeau@provalisresearch.com>]

We developed a text mining application an another 
one for qualitative analysis (manual coding and 
annotation) of documents.  Many people use our 
tools and then export their data to a statistical 
software to perform further analysis.  We already 
export to several file formats including SPSS, 
Excel, Tab delimited and comma delimited files, 
as well as a few others. We also import data from all these formats.

Since many of our users are using Stata, I 
thought it would be convenient to be able at 
least to write Stata data files or files that 
could at least be processed with Stata 
easily.  Being able to read Stata data files 
would also be great (we merge numerical data with 
the documents in a single database).

SPSS has a special DLL that may be used by 
programmers to read and write SPSS .sav 
files.  Is there such a programming library for 
Stata files? If not, is the format of the Stata 
data file documented somewhere?

If none of the above resources exists, I assume 
that we could write some text files with data and 
importation routines.  What would be the most 
convenient way to do this for a Stata user?

Normand Péladeau
Provalis Research



*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/