Re: st: how does insheet determine datatypes?

[David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net>]

I'd like to add a little tangential comment.

Insheet, at least as it has been up to Stata 8, behaves ungracefully 
if the second line contains var lables (and var names are in the 
first line), which is how some raw datasets are composed.  In this 
case, you get everything as string -- usually very long ones.  And 
the var names in the raw data are ignored; you get default names v1, 
v2, etc..  And what were supposed to be the var names and labels end 
up as data in the first and second observations.

If you encounter this situation, you may want to use -convert_top_lines-.
ssc install convert_top_lines

This doesn't fix -insheet-, but cleans up the mess afterwards.

(I don't know if -insheet- has become more graceful in Stata 9; I 
haven't yet made that leap.)

HTH.

--David


At 12:51 PM 1/6/2007, you wrote:

> Insheet is indeed very efficient in finding the correct format of raw data.
>
> The only situation giving problems for me is reading raw files with 
> a unique 10 digit person identifier. Handling this large integer as 
> a key in merge gives problems. To force the variable to a string 
> either create a dictionary or use the mechanism described by Bill 
> Gould, namely to have just one record where the column contains letters.
>
> I edit the raw file manually by adding a record at the top after 
> variable names or (better) use stata to add that line:
> cpr    v1    v2    v3
> 0xx1201956    1    2    2            // this record will force the 
> first variable to string
> 0101201956    1    2    2
> 1101201954    1    2    1
> etc .... rest of records
> and then read as :
> insheet using myfile
> drop in 1
> ....and I have the cpr variable as a string without the "fake" record
>
> Jens Lauritsen, MD, PhD
> University of Southern Denmark
> Odense University Hospital, Denmark
> [...]
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