On Apr 5, 2006, at 11:04 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> I am using S/E 9.1 for Macintosh. Perhaps I am missing something
> woefully obvious, but shouldn't the use of -xmlsave- create a file
> that is readable by Excel?? As I understand the help file, the
> following syntax ought to create a file (generic spreadsheet) that
> Excel can read:
>
> xmlsave gofigure, doc(excel)
>
> After gofigure.xml is created, the file can be opened w/ a text
> editor, albeit not w/ MS Excel. Could this be because I'm using a
> Mac??
There appears to be a bug in the Mac version of Microsoft Excel, in that it
doesn't truly parse the XML spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/
If you open the XML file produced by Stata you will see the first line looks
like:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='US-ASCII' standalone='yes'?>
If you (using any text editor) change all the single quotes on this line to
double quotes, Excel for Mac will properly parse the document. The modified
line would look like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII" standalone="yes"?>
The use of single versus double quotes should not matter based on the XML spec
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-XMLDecl) that defines the xml tag in the
prolog of the document.
So, while it is perfectly legal to use single quotes, the next exectable update
of Stata will have a change to -xmlsave- to use double quotes for the sake of
allowing the Mac Excel parser to read the document.
Hope this clears up some of the confusion.
--Kevin
[email protected]
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