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Re: st: Keeping significant spaces with -infile- and -infix-


From   Phil Bardsley <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Keeping significant spaces with -infile- and -infix-
Date   Fri, 18 May 2007 09:08:50 -0400

Joseph Coveney wrote:

How can significant unimbedded spaces of string variables be retained when
importing fixed-width ASCII files?
Last year I brought this up with Stata Tech Support and got the reply below from Kevin Crow. The application I was working on needed to be automated in a way that precluded using Kevin's approach. I ended up going through SPSS first, then converting to Stata, since SPSS preserves leading and trailing blanks. What I'd like to see in Stata is something like a "notrim" option on -infile- that would keep leading and trailing blanks.

----------------------------
Dear Phil,

You might try using the -file- command to preserving leading blanks when
importing your text data into Stata. -file- is a programmer's command and
should not be confused with outfile, outsheet, -insheet-, -infile-, or -infix-,
which are the usual ways data is imported and exported in Stata. -file- allows
programmers to read and write both ASCII text and binary files, so -file- could
be used to write a program to input data or export data in some complicated
situation. For further assistance using the -file- command type -help file- in
your Command window.
----begin log file----
. clear

. tempname fh

. file open `fh' using vcal.dat, read

. file read `fh' line

. local j = 1

. set obs 1
obs was 0, now 1

. while r(eof)==0 {
2. . if `j' == 1 {
3. generate casid = substr("`line'", 1, 15) in `j'
4. generate vcol_1 = substr("`line'", 18, 1) in `j'
5. generate vcal_1 = substr("`line'", 19, 79) in `j'
6. file read `fh' line
7. generate vcol_2 = substr("`line'", 18, 1) in `j'
8. generate vcal_2 = substr("`line'", 19, 79) in `j'
9. }
10. . file read `fh' line
11. file read `fh' line
12. file read `fh' line
13. file read `fh' line
14. . }

. list

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1. | casid | vcol_1 |
| 2 6 3 | 1 |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| vcal_1 |
| 1111111BPPPPPPPP0000000000000000000111111111111111111111111.. |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| vcol_2 | vcal_2 |
| 2 | 2 |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+

. gen stl=strlen(vcal_2)

. list stl vcal_2

+-----------------------------------------------------+
| stl vcal_2 |
|-----------------------------------------------------|
1. | 45 2 |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
----end log file----




Sincerely,

Kevin Crow


--
Phil Bardsley <[email protected]>
Research Programming Services
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 USA
919-966-2825

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