Roy Wada detailed a strategy to ensure that those variables are read in
as you want.
An alternative downstream fix is to -tostring- the mis-read integer
variables with a leading zero format. That's a single line.
Nick
[email protected]
Xia Jing
I am reading a comma delimited file (.txt) to STATA with "insheet", but
I'd like to make sure some variables are read in as strings, as I do not
want to lose leading zeros in these variables (ICD-9 procedure codes).
Stata currently reads them in as integers.
I know I can manually change the first line values of these variables to
some artificial characters. But with large files and large number of
variables, this approach becomes quite inconvenient. I'm writing to ask
whether there is a better way to do this.
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