Re: st: Stata fails to read all the data from a test file (was Helpagain)

[Ron�n Conroy <rconroy@rcsi.ie>]

Robin Newberry wrote:

> >  There's just a
> >large swath of records that aren't importing into Stata, and all
> >happen to be in the "03" year.
>
> Actually, there's a huge chunk of "02"s missing as well, plus others
> (Stata is importing about 2000 records, and I have over 4000).
> --
Two possibilities:

When Stata quietly finishes reading data before the end of your file, it 
is often because it has encountered something that it regards as an end 
of file. This is often a legacy from old DOS files, which regularly seem 
infested with this sort of junk. It is an idea to determine where Stata 
stops reading data, and if it has skipped a chunk of data or actually 
just finished before the end of the file. View the text file in a text 
editor set to show invisible characters. You may find some strange 
non-printing character there.

A text editor will zap these oddities.

The second possibility is that the dates have been read, but there is a 
problem with the input line, and the date has been read into another 
variable. This can happen if Stata mistakes a character within a 
variable for a delimiter. Strings not enclosed in quotes can be the 
culprit here, or numbers formatted with commas rather than periods as 
thousand-separators.



--

Ronan M Conroy (rconroy@rcsi.ie) 
Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics 
Royal College of Surgeons 
Dublin 2, Ireland 
+353 1 402 2431 (fax 2764) 
-------------------- 
Just say no to drug reps 
http://www.nofreelunch.org/

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