RE: st: RE: Insheet Command Problem

["Sarah Edgington" <sedging@ucla.edu>]

Davia,
I don't know what you mean by "use the drop command with insheet."  There is
not a drop option with -insheet- if that's what you're asking (type -help
insheet- to see what options you can specify).  You can use the -drop-
command after insheet, but that won't help you if you can't read the whole
file.  

Stat Transfer might be your ideal option here.  It will let you read a
delimited file and output a subset of the variables as a Stata file.

However, you again do not specify the actual error messages you receive.
Are you actually getting a no room to add more variables error or is Stata
telling you something else?  There are a lot of things that can go wrong in
creating a comma-delimited file so I would not automatically assume without
reading the error message that memory is the problem.  I'd be really
surprised if you couldn't -insheet- a 1.2MB file unless something else is
wrong with it.  You initially said the dataset was more than 500MB and that
I could see causing problems.  Raw text files are smaller than Stata files
so it's no surprise that you need more memory than the size the .csv file
takes up on disk, no matter what that size may be.

Additionally, you should note in the FAQ that you are requested to specify
what version of Stata you're using if not the current version.  Set memory
is no longer necessary in Stata 12 so I assume you must be using an earlier
version.

Hope that helps.

-Sarah

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Davia Downey
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 4:01 PM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: RE: Insheet Command Problem

Sarah,

Do you know if I can use the drop command with insheet? It seems there's a
problem with the size of the memory I'm setting. Even when I go up to 2g
(it's only a 1.2 MB size file), it still won't read the entire file.

Davia

Davia Cox Downey
Assistant Professor of Public Administration School of Public, Nonprofit &
Health Administration Grand Valley State University



242C DeVos Center
401 West Fulton Street
Grand Rapids, MI  49504Email: downeyd@gvsu.edu









On 6/14/12 6:08 PM, "Sarah Edgington" <sedging@ucla.edu> wrote:

>Davia,
>I'm pretty sure the "error in line 4508597 of file" is a red herring. 
>The entire error you're seeing is because specifying fewer variable 
>names than there are variables in varlist is invalid syntax.  As an 
>experiment I tried doing the same thing with a csv file that I know 
>works fine with -insheet- if I don't give a variable list.  When I 
>specified a subset of the variables in the varlist (that is, when I 
>used the invalid syntax) I got the error
>message:
>too few variables specified
>error in line 2534 of file
>
>Since there are 2,534 lines in the file I was trying to -insheet- my 
>suspicion is that what Stata is really saying is "I got to the very end 
>of the file and I still couldn't figure out how you wanted me to fit 
>all these variables into seven variable names, sorry."
>
>You say that using -insheet- for the whole file "still doesn't seem to 
>work." What is the actual error message you get?  It sounds like the 
>file is large enough that maybe it could be a memory issue but it's 
>worth figuring out if there is some other problem with the file before 
>trying to deal with that.
>
>-Sarah
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Davia Downey
>Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 2:21 PM
>To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>Subject: Re: st: RE: Insheet Command Problem
>
>When I have TextEdit look for the line 4508597 it says it's an invalid 
>line number. Is there a way I can rearrange the file in text edit in 
>order to read each line separately?
>
>Davia Cox Downey
>Assistant Professor of Public Administration School of Public, 
>Nonprofit & Health Administration Grand Valley State University
>
>
>
>242C DeVos Center
>401 West Fulton Street
>Grand Rapids, MI  49504Email: downeyd@gvsu.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>On 6/14/12 5:01 PM, "Richard Herron" <richard.c.herron@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>4508597
>
>
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