RE: st: Getting rid of binary codes so I can read in files - reposted

[Orian Brook <ob11@st-andrews.ac.uk>]

Thanks all for your helpful responses. 

The different ways of specifying filefilter, and looking at the data using
chunky, unfortunately didn't help. In terms of "hangs", it's possible that
if I left it running indefinitely maybe it would work, but as I have 130
files I don't have that long! 

Google refine looks interesting but doesn't seem to read in my data, and in
any case I was hoping to use stata syntax so that I could copy-paste syntax
for different files, to speed up the process and make sure I can check my
work. However, I have realised that I could do this by using Access as
before, but import the files using sql syntax, then read them into stata
using the odbc link, which fulfils my criteria and I know already works.

Thanks again

Orian
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Dimitriy V.
Masterov
Sent: 19 January 2012 20:54
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: Getting rid of binary codes so I can read in files -
reposted

Orian,

I sent a response to Statalist on Jan 13, but for some reason it does not
show up in the archives, so I am sending it again in case it might prove
helpful.

I'm not sure if you're specifying the binary zero character correctly. Try
"filefilter file1 file2, from(\0) to() replace".

I am also not sure what you mean by "hangs". 2 million characters may take a
bit of time to replace.

It may also be helpful to see what the first few rows of your data look like
(before and after the filefilter). A good command for that is chunky with
the peek option from ssc:

ssc install chunky
chunky using file1or2.txt, peek(5)

HTH,
DVM
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