Re: st: variable name with special character

[Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net>]

Thanks, that did the trick. It was char(160), of course, so

. renvars _all, substr("`=char(160)'" "")

did the trick. Interestingly, Stata even allowed things like:

. d q_71a*

              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
--------------------------------------------------------------
q_71a           byte    %10.0g
q_71a           str63   %63s


cheers,
Jeph


On 2/10/2014 3:39 PM, Nick Cox wrote:
> If you can get Stata to tell you what the character(s) is/are, you are
> home and dry.
>
> So, something like
>
> foreach v of var * {
> mata : st_local("chars", invtokens(strofreal(ascii("`v'"))))
> di "`v'" "{col 20}" "`chars'"
> }
>
> This is how it works for auto.dta
>
> make               109 97 107 101
> price              112 114 105 99 101
> mpg                109 112 103
> rep78              114 101 112 55 56
> headroom           104 101 97 100 114 111 111 109
> trunk              116 114 117 110 107
> weight             119 101 105 103 104 116
> length             108 101 110 103 116 104
> turn               116 117 114 110
> displacement       100 105 115 112 108 97 99 101 109 101 110 116
> gear_ratio         103 101 97 114 95 114 97 116 105 111
> foreign            102 111 114 101 105 103 110
>
> In your case, feeding A3* rather than * should be sufficient, and
> you'll want to look for high values at the end of each string.
>
> Nick
> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>
>
> On 10 February 2014 20:22, Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net> wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I used Stat/Transfer v12 to create a Stata dataset from an Excel file. When
> > I open the file in Stata, I find that many of the variable names have
> > special characters (apparently), because Stata can't see them. Example:
> >
> >
> >   . d A3*
> >
> >                 storage   display    value
> >   variable name   type    format     label      variable label
> >   ------------------------------------------------------------
> >   A3              str2    %2s
> >   A3a             str2    %2s
> >   A3b             str2    %2s
> >   A3c_1           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_2           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_3           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_4           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_5           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_6           str2    %2s
> >   A3c_7           str2    %2s
> >
> >
> >   . d A3
> >   A3 ambiguous abbreviation
> >   r(111);
> >
> > So there seems to be a non-printing character trailing -A3-; I have dozens
> > of these in the dataset. In the original excel file, all seems to be in
> > order. There are trailing blanks in the top row; however,
> >
> >   . renvars _all, postsub(" " "")
> >   no renames necessary
> >
> > Any thoughts on how I can identify and repair the problem with these
> > variable names?
> >
> > thanks,
> > Jeph
> >
> >
> >
> > *
> > *   For searches and help try:
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> > *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
> *
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> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
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