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st: Re: Infile stops reading dataset
Bill Gould's advice solved my problem immediately, and we are now
happily working with our data.
I'd like to take this public forum to thank Bill for his great help with
this, and tell a little story. It's a story that shows what a great
company Stata is, and why it's got so much loyalty.
After sending the message I was at home for lunch, and disturbed by
several telemarketing calls. The phone rang again, and I was inclined to
let it ring, but noticed that the name was listed as Stata Corp. Lo and
behold, it was Bill Gould himself ringing/calling me at home to tell me
the solution to the problem. This was quite the extra mile in terms of
customer service.
Thanks to Bill for answering this question, and I hope that he is not
overwhelmed trying to live up to the expectations he will answer all
questions on Statalist with a personal phone call 2 hours after it was
posted.
Cheers
Evan Roberts
Anytime you have difficulty reading a file, try out -hexdump, analyze-.
I typed
. hexdump no1875a.dat, analyze
and saw that -hexdump- flagged the file as binary. Everything -hexdump-
reported looked reasonable, except it mentioned that there were 3
"Extended Control Characters", and I knew that was odd. Next, I typed
. hexdump no1875a.dat, tabulate
which gave me a tabulation of every character in the file. The 0xff
jumped out at me, although there would be no reason why it should jump out
at anybody else. As I said, these days, 0xff is just another character,
but I knew Stata's history.
It was from -hexdump no1875a.dat, tabulate- that I learned "X" was never
used. So I used -filefilter- to change 0xff to X and then tried to
read the data. It worked.
- -- Bill
[email protected]
------------
Evan Roberts
Minnesota Population Center and Department of History
University of Minnesota
<[email protected]>
www.pop.umn.edu/~eroberts
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