st: variable name with special character

[Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net>]

All,

I used Stat/Transfer v12 to create a Stata dataset from an Excel file. 
When I open the file in Stata, I find that many of the variable names 
have special characters (apparently), because Stata can't see them. Example:


 . d A3*

               storage   display    value
 variable name   type    format     label      variable label
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 A3              str2    %2s
 A3a             str2    %2s
 A3b             str2    %2s
 A3c_1           str2    %2s
 A3c_2           str2    %2s
 A3c_3           str2    %2s
 A3c_4           str2    %2s
 A3c_5           str2    %2s
 A3c_6           str2    %2s
 A3c_7           str2    %2s


 . d A3
 A3 ambiguous abbreviation
 r(111);

So there seems to be a non-printing character trailing -A3-; I have 
dozens of these in the dataset. In the original excel file, all seems to 
be in order. There are trailing blanks in the top row; however,

 . renvars _all, postsub(" " "")
 no renames necessary

Any thoughts on how I can identify and repair the problem with these 
variable names?

thanks,
Jeph



*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/