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RE: st: -destring- and missing values


From   "Jeph Herrin" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: -destring- and missing values
Date   Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:46:31 -0400

Thanks. I my case, I have a few variables that are not numeric; I don't want
those converted to real. Nor do I want to sort out in advance which are
which - I want to -destring- exactly those variables with only numerical
values stored as strings. 


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Nakoneshny
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2013 12:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: -destring- and missing values

Jeph,

Can you not take advantage of the -force- option of -destring- here?

Steve

On 2013-10-02, at 10:07 AM, Jeph Herrin wrote:

> All,
> 
> I have hundreds of variables that look like this:
> 
> . d q1
> 
>              storage   display    value
> variable name   type    format     label      variable label
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> q1               str2    %2s  
> 
> . tab q1, m
> 
>        q1  |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>            |          2        0.89        0.89
>         1  |        216       96.00       96.89
>         2  |          7        3.11      100.00
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>      Total |        225      100.00
> 
> but when I try to use -destring-
> 
> . destring q1, replace
> q1  contains nonnumeric characters; no replace
> 
> According to the documentation,
> 
>    destring treats both empty strings "" and "." as indicating sysmiss 
> (.)...
>    destring also ignores any leading or trailing spaces so that, for 
> example,
>    " " is equivalent to "" and " . " is equivalent to ".".
> 
> Why is -destring- not converting my variables to numeric? I think I 
> must be missing something very obvious.
> 
> I can get around this by
> 
> replace q1 = "." if mi(q1)
> 
> but I don't think I should have to.
> 
> 
> J
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *
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> 



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