"you" here presumably meaning Fred's collaborators.
There is a home-grown -egen- function called -sieve()-
in -egenmore- from SSC that could be used to keep
alphanumeric characters only.
Nick
[email protected]
Rafal Raciborski
> you could also use the clean() function in excel first, which removes
> all nonprintable characters, before pasting into stata.
Fred Wolfe
> > To see the difference, I used -outfile- and then examined the two
> > -apatkey-s at the hexadecimal level in a text editor. The key
> > variable that didn't merge contained HEX(AO) characters instead of
> > Hex(20). Hex(A0) is also a "blank" character (a
> "non-breaking space"
> > in MS office). In HEX the code was "20 A0 A0 22" or space NB-space
> > NB-space ". Somehow this must have been created in the Excel file
> > that was sent to me.
> >> Someone sent me a list of IDs (apatkey)for participants
> registered in our
> >> databank. They sent an Excel file (alas). I pasted it into
> Stata and later
> >> used StatTransfer, both with the same result.
> >>
> >> What I did was to save the IDs sent to me. Then I -used-
> my databank and
> >> merged the new data in. The problem was that the merge
> didn't work as
> >> people with the same apatkey didn't merge. Tracing this
> down, I found that
> >> the length of the merged variable was different from the
> master variable.
> >> It would seem that there are hidden characters in the case where
> >> _merge == 2.
> >>
> >> Questions. Does anyone know how to see those hidden
> characters? Is this a
> >> known problem with the hated Excel?
> >>
> >> . replace apatkey=trim(apatkey)
> >> . l apat greger _merge length if index(apatkey, "CLE210928")
> >>
> >> +-----------------------------------------+
> >> | apatkey greger _merge length |
> >> |-----------------------------------------|
> >> 28469. | CLE210928 . 1 9 |
> >> 74437. | CLE210928 1 2 12 |
> >> +-----------------------------------------+
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