Re: st: finding incorrectly entered data

[Richard Goldstein <richgold@ix.netcom.com>]

-help destring-; note the ignore option

Rich

On 6/15/11 4:04 PM, Michael Eisenberg wrote:
> Colleagues,
> 
> I have what I hope will be a simple question.
> 
> I have a list of several thousand patients with a lab test and days
> from the test recorded.  I'd like to be able to analyze the days from
> test data as a continuous variable.  Unfortunately, some of the data
> in the days from lab test are not numeric and have odd characters
> (e.g. ?, +-5, na, etc).  See below.  Thus, I cannot run any summary
> statistics on it.
> 
> I cannot manually look through all the data due to the number of men
> to find the nonnumeric data.  Is there a way I can have stata somehow
> flag the rows with nonnumeric data?
> 
> Thank you in advance.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 
> id    test   daysfromtest
> 1     41          2
> 2     43          4
> 3     45          6
> 4     44          10
> 5     48          ?
> 6     44          +-5
> 7     24          na
> 8     74          2
> 9     94          3
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