Re: st: variable name with special character

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

-renvars- is from SJ. Interesting that there is still life in the old
horse, even with the spectacular extension of -rename- in Stata 12.


Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 10 February 2014 20:52, Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> *
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>>
> *
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