Import and export delimited text (CSV) data

Sometimes, we would like to work with data that are stored as delimited text files. These files might contain comma-separated values (CSVs), which are often stored with a .csv extention. It is easy to import data from a delimited text file using Stata's import delimited command.

Let's begin by creating a CSV file for to use in our example. We first open a Stata system dataset called auto.

. sysuse auto
(1978 automobile data)

Next, let's use Stata's export delimited command to export our auto dataset to a comma-delimited text file with a .csv file extension named myauto.csv.

. export delimited myauto.csv
file myauto.csv saved

You can verify that the file was exported successfully by typing ls, and you should see a file named myauto.csv.

. ls

   (output omitted)
   4.5k   2/08/24 16:38  myauto.csv

Now we can import our comma-delimited text file back into Stata. Let's first type clear to clear Stata's memory.

. clear

Then, we can use import delimited to import the data from myauto.csv.

. import delimited myauto.csv
(encoding automatically selected: ISO-8859-1)
(12 vars, 74 obs)

Let's type describe to verify that our data imported successfully.

. describe

Contains data
 Observations:            74
    Variables:            12


Variable      Storage   Display    Value
    name         type    format    label      Variable label

make            str17   %17s                  
price           int     %8.0g                 
mpg             byte    %8.0g                 
rep78           byte    %8.0g                 
headroom        float   %9.0g                 
trunk           byte    %8.0g                 
weight          int     %8.0g                 
length          int     %8.0g                 
turn            byte    %8.0g                 
displacement    int     %8.0g                 
gear_ratio      float   %9.0g                 
foreign         str8    %9s

Sorted by: 
     Note: Dataset has changed since last saved.

Now we can save our data to a Stata dataset by typing save myauto.

. save myauto
file myauto.dta saved

The import delimited command has many options, including the ability to import data that were saved with different delimiters. You can learn more about these options by clicking on the link to the YoutTube video below. You can read more about these commands by clicking on the links to the Stata manual entries below.

See it in action

Watch Importing delimited data.