Re: st: foreign language symbols not recognized in string variables

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

Dear Audinga,

Most modern software (OS and applications) work with Unicode. Stata
does not work with Unicode. Unicode encodes characters with 2 or more
bytes. In Stata each character must be 1 byte only. You need to make
sure the input CSV file is encoded in a codepage proper for your
region, presumably 1252.

See more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

Make sure your text editor does NOT save the text in Unicode. Some
editors do this automatically when they detect non-ASCII characters.

Note that you can use only one codepage for the whole file (characters
absent in ASCII and current ANSI page will be usually replaced with
the ?-marks).

Note that Stata still may not be displaying these characters correctly
(you also need to set up the fonts in Stata correctly), but may be
processing the data correctly.  Use the -hexdump- command of Stata to
see the hex codes of characters in your file.

I worked with Cyrillic, Vietnamese and other alphabets in Stata, so
this is definitely possible. Just requires some adjustment of
settings.

Hope this helps.

Best, Sergiy



On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Audinga Baltrunaite
<audinga.baltrunaite@ne.su.se> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am importing data from a .CSV file to Stata using an "insheet"
> command. The data set contains several string variables in Lithuanian
> language (it uses an extended version of a Latin alphabet). Even
> though "Lithuanian" letters are viewed correctly in a .CVS file, Stata
> substitutes them with other symbols (specials symbols, combinations of
> a few letters, etc). Moreover, even when I manually input the correct
> letters from the keyboard using the Data Editor, changes are not saved
> - the old symbol is deleted, but the new symbol does not appear.
>
> The only solution I have in mind now is to eliminate Lithuanian
> letters from the .CSV file transforming them into (more or less)
> equivalent English ones. Since some words may loose their sense, it is
> far from an ideal one.
>
> Has anybody encountered similar problems? Any solutions?
>
> Thanks a lot!
> Best,
> Audinga
>
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Audinga Baltrunaite
> <audinga.baltrunaite@ne.su.se> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I am importing data from a .CSV file to Stata using an "insheet" command.
>> The data set contains several string variables in Lithuanian language (it
>> uses an extended version of a Latin alphabet). Even though "Lithuanian"
>> letters are viewed correctly in a .CVS file, Stata substitutes them with
>> other symbols (specials symbols, combinations of a few letters, etc).
>> Moreover, even when I manually input the correct letters from the keyboard
>> using the Data Editor, changes are not saved - the old symbol is deleted,
>> but the new symbol does not appear.
>>
>> The only solution I have in mind now is to eliminate Lithuanian letters from
>> the .CSV file transforming them into (more or less) equivalent English ones.
>> Since some words may loose their sense, it is far from an ideal one.
>>
>> Has anybody encountered similar problems? Any solutions?
>>
>> Thanks a lot!
>> Best,
>> Audinga
>>
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