Re: st: tostring can produces "." from missing numeric values?!

[William Buchanan <william@williambuchanan.net>]

Does the -force- option of the append command not take care of the formatting issues for you?  Not sure it will do anything with the periods, but it would at least alleviate the concern about different storage types when appending.

HTH,
Billy

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 30, 2014, at 17:00, László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This is a strange situation, and seriously tripped me up in StataMP 13
> for the mac. I think people should be aware of the fact that it can
> happen with tostring (version 3.0.0  01aug2003), and perhaps even
> submit it as a bug. I see no option not to let it happen.
> 
> I have no time to investigate further, maybe it only happened because
> all values for missing for a variable, but this shouldn't have
> happened anyway.
> 
> Actually, this made of a string variable of blanks (missing for this
> sheet of the data) a string variable of "."s: Stata imported the
> variables as numeric first (from a delimited text file) as there was
> no value to guide it, and then when I tried to make sure I am working
> with strings so I can append the sheets to a larger data file, I got
> the back the dots.. Never missing. Very confusing.
> 
> I am happy to learn how I could prevent this from happening. It is
> cumbersome to count which columns should be strings for the
> -stringcol- option of -import delimited-.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Laszlo
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