Excel '97 and above, for instance, stores characters in Unicode. Thus, when read, they will not give Stat/Transfer information on the code-page that is in use and when they are written, they have no place for Stat/Transfer to store the code page that was used.įor some file formats, the user will not need to worry about analysis of this. However, many of the file formats that Stat/Transfer supports were written in the days in which ASCII was the way of representing strings. It is thus capable of handling strings in any language. In Stat/Transfer 13, all characters are represented internally in Unicode. Fortunately, order is now being restored to this Babel with the proliferation of Unicode, a means of uniformly representing the characters of all languages. This resulted in different, incompatible character encoding systems, even for the encoding of a single language's character set. For languages such as Japanese, which required many more characters, other multi-byte character sets were developed. Later, different eight-bit relatives of ASCII were developed, which allowed the encoding of an additional 128 characters, such as accented letters and various other symbols. The most popular of these encodings, ASCII, allowed the representation of upper and lower case letters, numbers and various symbols. While you are doing that, I am back to checking what hidden treasures I can discover in my old data….In the early days of computing, characters and numbers were represented by seven (and sometimes fewer) bits.
It worked for my old files, so please have a look. I guess it also does some stats’ stuff, but as mentioned I already have R for that. AM Statistical Software can be downloaded for free from the American Institutes for Research at: The internet has free stuff, and I am very pleased to let you know there is a free alternative to STAT/Transfer to finally get rid of those old SAS files and change them to alternative Excel/STATA/etc data files. They do have a demo, but this only transfers a random sample of the data which, in my book, is pretty useless. But surprise, STAT/Transfer costs money as well. STAT/Transfer used to do that trick very well. So now I don’t have SAS, but I do have the occasional SAS file that needs transferring so it can be used in R. Fair enough….but SAS is not cheap, which prompted me (and likely others) to switch to something else. As a result, apparently their source code is a big secret and transfer to other formats is difficult. Unfortunately, the people at the SAS Institute do not very much like these procedures and prefer that everyone uses their program. This is not so much of a problem for most types of data, since they can be imported in other programs as well. If you have been working with datasets you, at some point along the way, must have been stuck with the wrong data format.
0 kommentar(er)
