Re: st: Stripping ASCII characters

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

Anthony,
the answer is yes, it is possible.

Specifically, you can open the file as a binary for reading, open
another one for writing, read byte-by-byte, decide what to do with
each byte depending on it's value (e.g. you can skip the 255 bytes,
replace them with spaces, or apply some other strategy).

See here:
http://www.stata.com/manuals13/pfile.pdf

Best, Sergiy Radyakin

PS: are you absolutely sure the 255s are skipped by -filefilter-?

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Thomas, Anthony
<anthony_h_thomas@brown.edu> wrote:
> Hi Statalist,
>
> When insheeting a csv file using Stata 11 - Unix, Stata aborts with the error:
>
> too many variables specified
> error in line 5000000 of file
>
> Output of "hexdump" indicated the file contained control characters
> (^Z), and was in binary format, when it was expected to be ASCII. I
> tried using "filefilter "f1.csv" "f2.csv", from(^Z) to() replace" to
> strip the problem characters, but a hexdump on f2.csv indicates the
> (^Z) are still present. From what I understand ^Z (sub) is used in
> place of a character that cannot be read by Stata, is this the case?
> If so, is there any way to strip these characters from my file prior
> to import?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Anthony
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