Re: st: mac editor for big files

[Richard Goldstein <richgold@ix.netcom.com>]

thanks to Phil and Eric

some responses and what I have done so far:

the reason for wanting an editor for these files is that Stata will not
correctly import them using -insheet- (or anything else I tried) due to
"problems" in the data (e.g., one file had 2 successive end-of-line
characters in the middle of what was supposed to be a line of data); so
I want to look at the small number of files with apparent problems to
see if I can fix them prior to importing; since I don't know what the
problem is or even where it occurs, I have been unable to figure out how
to use -filefilter-

I downloaded micvim, ultraedit (trial version) and two different emacs
versions; ultraedit did open the files but was so slow at even moving
within the file that I deleted the program; the emacs programs were a
little better but not much; micvim appears to work well, though I still
haven't figured out how to get it to show what are ordinarily "hidden"
characters (e.g., tab, eol); I need to see these to "fix" at least two
files; however, just opening the files solved one problem for me: it
told me how many lines of data there were supposed to be so I can check
the results of importing

Rich

On 8/19/11 5:34 PM, Eric Booth wrote:
> <>
> One more suggestion for working with large text files from Stata is to look at the user-written files -chewfile- and -chunky- (H/T to Dan Blanchette for pointing me to -chunky-) from SSC for breaking the large file up into manageable pieces.
> 
> I hadn't see the LargeFile plugin for Vim that Phil mentioned - very helpful.
> 
> - Eric
> On Aug 19, 2011, at 4:23 PM, Eric Booth wrote:
> 
>> <>
>>
>> I usually use TW as well for large files, but I guess I haven't opened one that is larger than 1GB since I've never had one choke.  I'd try Vim or UltraEdit --  I've read that both can handle large (>1 or 2 GB ) text files.  Also, VEDIT can handle text files up to 2 GB, but it's not free.
>>
>> However, you can load large text files into Stata via commands like -insheet-, or if it's not a dataset you can import with -intext- (From SSC).  Also, you can view just a part of the file from terminal by using the 'head' or 'tail' commands to see the start or end of the large text file very quickly (e.g.,  head -n 100 myfile.txt  to see the first 100 lines).  Finally, if you need to edit or make changes to the file before importing into Stata as a dataset, consider using -filefilter- to make changes to the file.
>>
>> - Eric
>>
>> On Aug 19, 2011, at 4:02 PM, Richard Goldstein wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I currently use Text Wrangler; however, neither it nor BBEdit will,
>>> apparently, edit ascii files >1 GB in size (I have 32 GB of RAM); does
>>> anyone know of an editor for the Mac that will edit files of >1 GB?
>>>
>>> Rich
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