Re: st: handling "special characters" with tabout

[Teresio Poggio <terlist@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

no answers received to my post - may be this is not a common problem -
but I've made a few steps forward ...

It has sorted out that TABOUT works properly when handling Western
European special characters in variable and value labels. I've tested
it inspecting the .csv output files with a few different text editors.
My apologies to Ian Watson for having doubts on this.

My aim was to have .csv files allowing me to open them in MS Excel
with a double-click, with the correct characters' encoding already
set.
In fact Excel (Office 2011 for Mac) - not TABOUT - seems the cause the
problem, by not encoding these characters (western european mac)
correctly  ...

I've tried to repeat the procedures on a Windows xp environment (Stata
IC 11.2) and the all procedure works nicely. Labels should be encoded
within the Windows environment - Using a data file documented in the
Mac environment will result in characters' encoding  problems.

It has been funny to see that Excel for Mac also works well with the
.csv tables produced in the Windows environment...

Hope this could be of use to colleagues in "special characters" countries.
Kind regards

Teresio
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