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Re: st: Importing variable names with French accents via -insheet-
From
Sergiy Radyakin <[email protected]>
To
"[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject
Re: st: Importing variable names with French accents via -insheet-
Date
Tue, 8 Oct 2013 09:53:26 -0400
Dear Charles,
the variable names in Stata must be comprised of letters a..z, A..Z,
digits 0..9 and an underscore, and may not start with a digit. Use of
any other symbols is NOT supported. Some conversion programs
(including one of my own) used to produce files with accents/umlauts
and other non ASCII latin characters if they were present in the
original file. Although Stata can open such a file, some commands will
not work later. Non-Stata software that actually validates the input
may refuse to work with such files. If anything, it is a bug and Stata
should properly respond with error 198 ".. invalid name". Use of the
non-ASCII characters in labels and strings is perfectly fine, but be
advised, that what you see as é may appear as ж on a different system
(depends on the user's settings).
I don't know how insheet works in Stata 13, but perhaps in Stata 14 it
could preserve the original variable names in the variable labels or
characteristics (always, or when they are different). Then the user
can decide what to do with them later.
So the answer to your question is: do not force Stata to have accented
variable names. Skip the original names all together, import file with
v1, v2 etc varnames, then rename and relabel them as appropriate.
Best, Sergiy Radyakin
On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Charles Vellutini
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> We are using Stata 13 on Windows.
>
> I know that Stata supports accented variable names :
>
> gen année = "test"
>
> will work perfectly for instance.
>
> But it seems that importing data with accented variable names from a cvs file though -insheet- does not work: accented letters are literally lost in translation. For example "année" in the cvs file become "anne" in Stata memory.
>
> Any workarounds or suggestions?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Charles Vellutini
> Directeur
>
> [email protected]
> www.ecopa.com
>
>
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