Outsheet to create a comma separated .txt

问题:

My variables in Stata are of the form:

  First Name: Allen
  Last Name: Von Schmidt
  Birth Year: 1965
  County: Cape May
  State: New Jersey

  First Name: Lee Roy
  Last Name: McBride
  Birth Year: 1967
  County: Cook
  State: Illinois

I would like to outsheet them to create comma separated rows in a .txt as:

 Allen,Von Schmidt,1965,Cape May, New Jersey
 Lee Roy,McBride,1967,Cook, Illinois

How can I use outsheet (or another command) to do this? Do I need to make the numerics into strings first? Do I need to add a commas to each variable first? Thanks!

Would something like the following work?

outsheet first last birth_year county state using FileName.txt, comma nolabel noquote

If I wanted to do the same thing but have the variables be " " separated would I remove the noquote in that previous stata code?

For example, suppose I might, instead, want an output of:

 "Allen","Von Schmidt","1965","Cape May","New Jersey"

回答1:

This looks more like a job that you would want to do with the file command, to keep full control over what is written to your file (especially if you have some possibly problematic ASCII characters like accents, which are common in names). See h file for the details.

I am not sure that I understand exactly what you have in your dataset, and in what format, so I will refrain from writing up a working example that would not fit your setup. The file command, however, is pretty straightforward (you can think of outsheet as a wrapper for it).