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Re: st: Comparing two data set


From   Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: Comparing two data set
Date   Wed, 2 Mar 2011 12:30:05 +0000

Let me summarize this as I see it.

You have adopted a user-written program from 2001 rather than use
official commands which allow you to address all facets of your
problem.

There are various pluses and minuses to this strategy.

The main plus is that you appear to have got exactly what you wanted,
and fast. That has to be important in a busy world.

In this particular case, the author is Thomas Steichen who is
well-known in the community as an extremely competent programmer. I
would say that even if he weren't a co-author of mine and a personal
friend.

Beyond that, various observations spring to mind.

-cf3- is explicit that a single identifier variable is expected and
that matches your situation. Fine, but something else will be needed
whenever your situation differs.

-cf3- dates from 2001. That it still works is a credit to Tom and to
Stata, but the help file alone talks about an internal procedure that
truncates variable names to 7 characters, which I would guess is much
more likely to bite with modern datasets and much longer variable
names. I also see much internal code that deals with date and time
formats, but much has changed in Stata's handling of dates and times
since the program was issued.

Let me stress: I do not want to disparage the use of user-written
programs. That would be absurd for various reasons! As said, I just
want to underline the pluses and minuses here. There are a lot of old
programs around which are not being maintained and may not be strongly
supported if users get into difficulties. (In my case, I have
documented at -njc_stuff- from SSC what I think remains of use and
what is superseded or obsolete.)

Nick

Rajaram Subramanian Potty

Thank you very much for the information. Installed the -cf3- and able
to generate the error list by the ID.


On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Kevin Owuor <[email protected]> wrote:

> Maybe you can Tryout cf3 package type --findit cf3--.it lists errors by id

[various suggestions]

>>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Rajaram Subramanian Potty
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We are carried out a survey and the data from the survey was entered
>>>> two times. Now, we want to compare these two data files for possible
>>>> data etnry errors. Please, inform how to compare the two data files
>>>> and identify the data entry error using stata.
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