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From | "Jeph Herrin" <stata@spandrel.net> |
To | <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: RE: -destring- and missing values |
Date | Wed, 2 Oct 2013 12:12:53 -0400 |
string values. So new question - how do I find and remove those? -trim- does not do it. -----Original Message----- From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Jeph Herrin Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2013 12:07 PM To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu Subject: st: -destring- and missing values All, I have hundreds of variables that look like this: . d q1 storage display value variable name type format label variable label ------------------------------------------------------------- q1 str2 %2s . tab q1, m q1 | Freq. Percent Cum. ------------+----------------------------------- | 2 0.89 0.89 1 | 216 96.00 96.89 2 | 7 3.11 100.00 ------------+----------------------------------- Total | 225 100.00 but when I try to use -destring- . destring q1, replace q1 contains nonnumeric characters; no replace According to the documentation, destring treats both empty strings "" and "." as indicating sysmiss (.)... destring also ignores any leading or trailing spaces so that, for example, " " is equivalent to "" and " . " is equivalent to ".". Why is -destring- not converting my variables to numeric? I think I must be missing something very obvious. I can get around this by replace q1 = "." if mi(q1) but I don't think I should have to. J * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/ * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/ * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/ * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/