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Re: st: replacing zero length strings with missing values
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: replacing zero length strings with missing values
Date
Tue, 4 Sep 2012 13:15:06 +0100
You tried to replace empty strings with numeric missing . -- but, as
you report here, that is a type mismatch.
There is nothing to do here: empty strings and missing strings are one
and the same in Stata. Consider
. di missing("")
1
. di missing(" ")
0
. di missing("frog")
0
A string value is missing if and only if it is empty. (That is, the
function -missing()- returns 1 for true if and only with string
arguments if and only if that string argument is empty.)
It is possible to replace "" with "." if you wish to show empty
strings explicitly, but that's all in the eye of the beholder: Stata
does not regard "." as denoting string missing: it's just a stop or
period character.
Nick
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:54 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have a large dataset in stata and one of the variables has a lot a
> observations that should be missing values but are instead zero length
> strings (ie. =="")
>
> I've tried
>
> foreach x of varlist myvariable {
> replace `x' = . if(`x' =="")
> }
>
> but this gives a type mismatch.
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