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 ...

At Orgtheory, Fabio asked about how to identify substrings within text fields in Stata. Although this is a seemingly simple proposal, there is one big problem, as Gabriel Rossman points out: Stata string fields can only hold 244 characters of text. As Fabio desires to use this field to analyze scientific abstracts, then 244 characters is obviously insufficient.

Gabriel Rossman has posted a solution he has called grepmerge that uses the Linux-based program grep to search for strings in files. This is a great solution, but it comes with one large caveat: it cannot be used in a native Windows environment. This is because the grep command ...