Ada Ma wrote:
> Dear Statalisters,
>
> I need to check if the data looks OK - the data should be delimited by
> pipe (|) so I want to check if there is any double quote in the data
> before I read it into Stata. The data is in txt format. I wonder
> which are text editors would allow me to open that up. All
> suggestions are welcomed.
>
This will be _highly_ dependent on your Operating System which you've
not mentioned.
Under M$-Windows (XP) there is a limit of 2Gb on the allocation of
contiguous memory to any one application and a 4Gb limit on that OS in
total for 32-bit systems. These are higher for 64-bit systems, but it
depends on the version of the OS you have (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx).
Its perhaps less of a problem under *NIX systems, but you'll need the
hardware and to have it configured to support allocation of >4Gb.
Personally if I wanted to check for double quotes in a file I'd use
'grep '"' [filename]', to search for a regular expression (grep is a
standard command on *NIX-like systems). Thanks to Nick Cox I was made
aware of the analogous function under MS-DOS which is the 'find'
command. I'm not sure about how to actually search for a double quote
though as the string you want to search for has to be encapsulated in
double quotes and a quick test of escaping it ("\"") didn't work. find
/? will give you more information and google may help to point you in
the right direction.
Neil
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