[email protected] wrote:
> I have posed the questions to Stata tech support, but the answers
> have not been entirely satisfactory. I would really appreciate your
> help in this:
>
> 1) Is there a Stata command to export data (to text format for
> example) which does not use the display format of the variables (but
> instead uses the storage format)?
> 2) If not, is it possible to export with a dictionary (the reverse of
> infilling with a dictionary), or is this done by manipulating the
> display formats prior to the export?
> 3) How can one make sure that there is no precision lost (however
> insignificant that may be) if one has to export data from a Stata
> file (assuming the import into Stata was done correctly), and does
> not have the "raw data" for comparison purposes (i.e. does formatting
> all vars to something like %17.6f take care of that)?
>
> For example:
> If I use insheet to import 103192286.98 into Stata, and then outsheet
> the record I get back something like 1.03e+08. Why is this
> happening? Stata reads in the variable as a float, and assigns a
> display format of %9.0g. Even if I change the display format, I
> still get a rounding error (and if I check in the browser, the number
> is 1.03e+08).
I think -outdat- downloadable from SSC comes near to what you want. The aim of
-outdat- is to write a dataset to an ASCII File and to write dictionaries for
various statistical packages (i.e. Limdep, SQL, Rats, RUMM, Stata, SPSS) to
read and label that ASCII-File. Before saving the ASCII-File, outdat sets a
fixed display-format for each variable according to the storage type. If you
take care of the storage type (-compress-), and -outdat- afterwards, you
should get what you want.
To install type
. ssc install outdat
Many regards
Uli
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