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Re: st: variable name with special character
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
"[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject
Re: st: variable name with special character
Date
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:39:14 +0000
If you can get Stata to tell you what the character(s) is/are, you are
home and dry.
So, something like
foreach v of var * {
mata : st_local("chars", invtokens(strofreal(ascii("`v'"))))
di "`v'" "{col 20}" "`chars'"
}
This is how it works for auto.dta
make 109 97 107 101
price 112 114 105 99 101
mpg 109 112 103
rep78 114 101 112 55 56
headroom 104 101 97 100 114 111 111 109
trunk 116 114 117 110 107
weight 119 101 105 103 104 116
length 108 101 110 103 116 104
turn 116 117 114 110
displacement 100 105 115 112 108 97 99 101 109 101 110 116
gear_ratio 103 101 97 114 95 114 97 116 105 111
foreign 102 111 114 101 105 103 110
In your case, feeding A3* rather than * should be sufficient, and
you'll want to look for high values at the end of each string.
Nick
[email protected]
On 10 February 2014 20:22, Jeph Herrin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
> *
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*
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