I have come across a problem several times that has been relatively frustrating to deal with. I have data that is downloaded from a site (specifically the Census (which is why this comes up consistently) in which the first two lines of the data contain the variable name and variable description respectively. This is incredibly useful for documenting data. Rather than attempting to figure out what variable pct001001 means, the description of the variable is right there.

The problem with data in this format is that Stata imports variables as string variables with the first observation being the variable description. I could pull the first two lines of the data ...