RE: st: Importing variable names with French accents via -insheet-

[Charles Vellutini <charles.vellutini@ecopa.com>]

Dear Sergiy,

Very clear. We'll follow your advice.
Many thanks!

Charles

-----Message d'origine-----
De : owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] De la part de Sergiy Radyakin
Envoyé : mardi 8 octobre 2013 15:53
À : statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Objet : Re: st: Importing variable names with French accents via -insheet-

Dear Charles,

the variable names in Stata must be comprised of letters a..z, A..Z, digits 0..9 and an underscore, and may not start with a digit. Use of any other symbols is NOT supported. Some conversion programs (including one of my own) used to produce files with accents/umlauts and other non ASCII latin characters if they were present in the original file. Although Stata can open such a file, some commands will not work later. Non-Stata software that actually validates the input may refuse to work with such files. If anything, it is a bug and Stata should properly respond with error 198 ".. invalid name". Use of the non-ASCII characters in labels and strings is perfectly fine, but be advised, that what you see as é may appear as ж on a different system (depends on the user's settings).

I don't know how insheet works in Stata 13, but perhaps in Stata 14 it could preserve the original variable names in the variable labels or characteristics (always, or when they are different). Then the user can decide what to do with them later.

So the answer to your question is: do not force Stata to have accented variable names. Skip the original names all together, import file with v1, v2 etc varnames, then rename and relabel them as appropriate.

Best, Sergiy Radyakin

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Charles Vellutini <charles.vellutini@ecopa.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> We are using Stata 13 on Windows.
>
> I know that Stata supports accented variable names :
>
> gen année = "test"
>
> will work perfectly for instance.
>
> But it seems that importing data with accented variable names from a cvs file though -insheet- does not work: accented letters are literally lost in translation. For example "année" in the cvs file become "anne" in Stata memory.
>
> Any workarounds or suggestions?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Charles Vellutini
> Directeur
>
> charles.vellutini@ecopa.com
> www.ecopa.com
>
>
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