Re: st: accuracy and preserving uniqueness of id

[Philip Ryan <philip.ryan@adelaide.edu.au>]

It look like you are reading in your -id- variable as a floating point 
number.  You cannot expect 18 digits of accuracy.  It's almost always best 
to read a long id variable in as a *string* variable.

Phil

At 05:33 PM 25/02/2003 -0500, you wrote:

> dear all,
>
> i'm using -infix- to read in a large dataset into stata. each line of the
> dataset begins with an 18 character, numeric, company identification
> block. each company occupies several lines, that all start with the same
> identification code. to make things clearer here's my sample code:
>
> infix id 1-18 reccat 19-20 var1 21-25 var2 26-30 ... if reccat=11
> infix id 1-18 reccat 19-20 var3 21-23 var4 24-27 ... if reccat=12
>
> after i ran this i took a look at my resulting dataset and to my surprise,
> the id displayed by Stata looked very different from the id i originally
> had in my flat text file.
>
> for example:
>
> in text, id = 200101380110999991
> in stata, id= 200101375269404672
>
> or
>
> in text, id = 200101380206999991(different from above)
> in stata, id= 200101375269404672(same as above)
>
> what's bothering me is that ids that are different in text become the same
> in stata. is there a way to preserve the accuracy and hence uniqueness of
> the ids in this situation?
>
> thanks in advance,
>
> Radu Ban
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
Philip Ryan
Associate Professor
Department of Public Health
University of Adelaide 5005
South Australia
tel 61 8 8303 3570
fax 61 8 8223 4075
http://www.public-health.adelaide.edu.au/

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*
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