Stephan Mankart <[email protected]> wrote,
> i am trying to read an ascii fixed format file [...] at the moment i am
> only trying to extract a single variable from the file and [...] i get the
> error: record too long. one of my suspicions was that stata gets confused
> about unix/windows new lines, [...]
Try the Stata command
. hexdump <filename>, analyze
For instance, if you are reading mydata.raw, type
. hexdump mydata.raw, analyze
Do not leave off the -analyze- option or you really will get a hexadecmal
dump of the file. From -hexdump, analyze-, you will get output that looks
something like this:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Line-end characters Line length (tab=1)
\r\n (DOS) 0 minimum 56
\n by itself (Mac) 512 maximum 147
\n by itself (Unix) 512
Space/separator characters Number of lines 512
[blank] 7,414 EOL at EOF? yes
[tab] 0
[comma] (,) 47 Length of first 5 lines
Control characters Line 1 80
binary 0 0 Line 2 63
CTL excl. \r, \n, \t 0 Line 3 63
DEL 0 Line 4 63
Extended (128-159,255) 0 Line 5 73
ASCII printable
A-Z 3,319
a-z 15,723 File format ASCII
0-9 6,154
Special (!@#$ etc.) 3,917
Extended (160-254) 0
---------------
Total 37,086
Observed were:
\n blank ( ) , - . 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : < > @ A B C D E F G H J L M N O
P R S T U V W _ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pay particular attention to Line-end characters, Line length, Number of lines,
and EOL at EOF (standing for end-of-line at end-of-file".
-- Bill
[email protected]
P.S. This is embarrassing: in the output above, it says
\n by itself (Mac) 512
\n by itself (Unix) 512
when it should have said
\r by itself (Mac) 0
\n by itself (Unix) 512
Obviously, we have a bug (we called the count-end-of-lines with \n
twice, instead of once with \n and again with \r). I have added that to
the to-fix list.
<end>
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