Re: st: Importing data with improper variable names

[Tirthankar Chakravarty <tirthankar.chakravarty@gmail.com>]

And add the following two lines to make your data pristine:
***************************
drop in 1
destring, replace
***************************

T

2010/8/3 Austin Nichols <austinnichols@gmail.com>:
> Glenn Hoetker <ghoetker@igb.illinois.edu>:
>
> You could write a little do file that does all of the requisite
> preprocessing.  Try these suggestions out:
>
> file open fh using /temp.txt, write
> file write fh `" "Name", "2001", "2002", "2003""' _n
> file write fh  `" "Fred", "3", "3", "0" "' _n
> file close fh
>
> insheet using /temp.txt, clear
> l, noo
> forv i=1/4 {
> if real("`=v`i'[1]'")==. {
>  ren v`i' `=v`i'[1]'
>  }
> else {
>  ren v`i' `="y"+string(`=v`i'[1]')'
>  }
> }
> drop in 1
> l, noo
> qui destring, replace
> reshape long y, i(Name) j(Year)
> l, noo
> erase /temp.txt
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Glenn Hoetker
> <ghoetker@igb.illinois.edu> wrote:
>> Greetings all.
>>
>> I have data downloaded as a text file from a website that comes in a form like
>>
>>        "Name", "2001", "2002", "2003"
>>        "Fred", "3", "3", "0"
>>
>> It's just a text file, so I'd normally just use
>>
>>        insheet using data.text, names
>>
>> However, since variable names can't begin with a number, the last variables get renamed v3 v4 v5.  That's inconvenient, because it's meant to be a year.   I can manually rename v3 to year2001, etc., but would rather not do so--I'll be importing this data fairly often,  v3 may not always map to 2001, and there are actually many more years than I've shown here.
>>
>> Can anyone suggest a way around this problem?  I'm using Stata 11 and have access to StatTransfer.  I'm on a Mac, giving me access to both AppleScript and the standard Unix suite of tools to pre-process the file, but I'm rusty with those and would prefer a "pure Stata" solution if feasible.
>>
>> Thank you for any pointers.
>>
>> Glenn
>
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-- 
To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond
recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg(v Gen r)
belongs to Flg(κ) (where v is the free variable of r).

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