No need for speculation. The need for
an initial letter or underscore is
non-negotiable and documented at [U] 11.3.
Clearly the data come this way: whether
you want to keep them this way depends on
your purposes, but most work with time
series is much better done long.
Otherwise your purposes are best served
by having the original names -- in
some other software -- as variable labels.
I can't recall whether -insheet- does this
automatically. If not, it can be done
in about four lines, I guess.
Nick
[email protected]
[email protected]
> I have a data set of quarterly figures in wide format, where the
> variable names range between 1996q1 and 2029q4
>
> The Stata command
>
> insheet using data.txt, names double
>
> will replace these variable names with q1 through q4 for the
> first four,
> then v10 through v141 for the subsequent ones.
>
> It looks like Stata, by default, assumes that variable names cannot be
> numeric, or cannot begin with numbers.
>
> Is there an easy way around this problem?
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