Note: This FAQ applies to older versions of Stata; in particular,
Stata 4.0 and earlier. It does not apply to the current version.
Why does the real function sometimes return missing values?
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Real function returns missing values
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Author
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Stata technical support
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The
real function will return a missing value if any character in
the string that it is converting from is not part of the number character
set.
This includes blanks! In fact, the most common cause of the
real function returning missing values, is that the strings that
you are converting contain leading or trailing blanks. You delete these
blanks from consideration using the
trim function.
. gen nval = real(trim(sval))
