The way to 'squeeze' out the extra space is to use _compress_
"Grochulski, W. Daniel" wrote:
>
> Dear Listers,
>
> While happily navigating my freshly installed Stata 8 (running under
> Windows 2000) I was stopped by seemingly odd behavior of the ODBC utility
> (one of the goodies in Stata 8). Loading tables via -odbc- is just a snap,
> there is, however, something wrong with the way the string variables are
> handled - my Stata consistently adds a 127 blank characters pad to any
> downloaded string variable, so i.e. 20 characters string is loaded and
> reported as having 147 characters (str147). This happens with both
> SQL-server and MS Access databases - below I reproduce results of the load
> from "Northwind" database to be compared with printouts given in Reference
> Manual for -odbc-. Since all these 'strxxx' strings are longer than 80
> characters Intercooled Stata can handle, this dataset is exploding into
> user's face when trying to -list-, -drop- or -keep- (Stata crashes and
> exits). One can of course extract the original strings by generating
> properly defined new string variables using substr function, but this is a
> bother (and you have to keep the 'oversized' string variables anyway).
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Daniel
>
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