Re: st: Append the Contents of Fixed Width Text File

[Steve Samuels <sjsamuels@gmail.com>]

You say you need to append the files together first.   Why first?

Something like this should produce the same result.

. save d1, replace emptyok
. foreach f in f1 f2 f3 {
. clear
. infile using dict.txt, using(`f'.txt).
. gen source = "`f'"
. append using d1
. save d1, replace
}

Steve

On Aug 17, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Phil Schumm wrote:

On Aug 17, 2013, at 8:22 AM, Rijo John <rmjohn@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have several large fixed with data files, one for each state. These are data files where each field has a fixed column location and width, rather than having the start and end of the field marked by a delimiter character, as in delimited ASCII files. Usually we write a dictionary program to extract only the columns we want from any given fixed width file. I need to append these together to one large file before I use dictionary on that large file.  The appended file should also have a variable indicating which dataset the particular observations originally belonged.


In bash (e.g., OS X or Linux), you could use something like

   for f in f1.txt f2.txt f3.txt; do sed -e "s/$/$f/" $f >> out.txt; done

to append the name of the file to the end of each row, and then concatenate the files into one file.  I'm sorry, I don't know how to do this in Windows.


-- Phil


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