st: problems with insheet and variables with "" , $ characters

["Ben Hoen" <bhoen@lbl.gov>]

Hi statalisters,

I have a large set of csv files that have roughly 60 variables (and as many
as 15,000 observations), two of variables are ad hoc descriptions (string
length 244) that users inputted and contain a whole host of characters
including: (, ), "", \, /, $, commas and many spaces.  Using insheet on the
csv file causes problems (because of the commas in these two fields I
suspect), but if I first open the file in excel and save it as a tab
delineated txt file, insheet seems to work perfectly (at least based on the
first 3 files).  

Because I have over 50 files to import I was hoping to find a way to
automate those steps.  

Any ideas for how to do this via Stata?  (I also have stat transfer)

Thanks much,

Ben

I am running Windows 7 64 bit with Stata 12.0 MP 

Ben Hoen
Principal Research Associate
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Office: 845-758-1896
Cell: 718-812-7589
bhoen@lbl.gov
http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/staff/hoen.html



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