st: tostring can produces "." from missing numeric values?!

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Hi,

This is a strange situation, and seriously tripped me up in StataMP 13
for the mac. I think people should be aware of the fact that it can
happen with tostring (version 3.0.0  01aug2003), and perhaps even
submit it as a bug. I see no option not to let it happen.

I have no time to investigate further, maybe it only happened because
all values for missing for a variable, but this shouldn't have
happened anyway.

Actually, this made of a string variable of blanks (missing for this
sheet of the data) a string variable of "."s: Stata imported the
variables as numeric first (from a delimited text file) as there was
no value to guide it, and then when I tried to make sure I am working
with strings so I can append the sheets to a larger data file, I got
the back the dots.. Never missing. Very confusing.

I am happy to learn how I could prevent this from happening. It is
cumbersome to count which columns should be strings for the
-stringcol- option of -import delimited-.

Thanks,

Laszlo
*
*   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/