st: Announcing new item in SSC; convert_top_lines

[David Kantor <dkantor@jhu.edu>]

Hi Everyone,

This is a repeat of an announcement that was made on June 8.  Some people 
at the recent NASUG meeting expressed an interest in this, but hadn't 
caught the original announcement.

There is [was] a new entry in SSC, convert_top_lines.

This program helps clean up the mess left when -insheet- can't gracefully 
handle some kinds of raw files. This can be used after -insheet-, to neaten 
the variable names and to assign variable labels, when the second line of 
the raw data file contains descriptive information suitable for labels, and 
these values interfered with the functioning of -insheet-.

Thanks to Kit Baum for placing this into the archives.
-- David

P.S., I should add that the effect, on -insheet-, of having these 
descriptive elements in line 2 of the raw file is...
 the variable names are v1, v2, etc.; the values in line 1 are *not* used 
as variable names;
 all items are taken as string, with typically very long string types 
(which are unnecessary, except for holding the values from line 2, which 
you don't want anyway);
 the contents of lines 1 and 2 remain in the dataset.

(I have received many files of this form from the U.S. Census Bureau; 
that's what motivated me to write this program.)

convert_top_lines is intended to (partly) fix this situation.  It renames 
the variables to the values found in line 1, and puts the values from line 
2 into variable labels.  It (optionally) will drop the first 2 lines. You 
can then follow it with -compress- and -destring-.

In looking over the package, I see ways I might improve it (and there is a 
typo in the .hlp file), but I am leaving it as-is for now.  If you already 
downloaded it, there is no need to redo that, as there have been no 
changes, so far.

Finally, Stata Corp has indicated that they will consider the possibility 
of making improvements to -insheet-, such that this package will become 
unnecessary.  Until then, it may be useful to some users.


David Kantor
Institute for Policy Studies
Johns Hopkins University
dkantor@jhu.edu
410-516-5404

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