-chewfile- would be one line for the user. I'll even write the help
file and send it to Kit.
ICD-9 codes are triple digits plus at least two decimals, depending
on the flavor. You need to put back one or two leading zeros, plus
worry about the floating points, and still not get it right because
the number of decimals could be moving up and down.
Roy
>
> 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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