[R] read.dta for files from stata 9.0

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Stefan Grosse wrote:

> On Tuesday 18 March 2008 03:33:02 pm K. Elo wrote:
> KE> Seems quite obvious to me: "not a stata version 5-8" means, that the 9.0
> KE> version is not supported. So You should save the file in stata ver. 8
> KE> format and then give a new try.
> KE>
> KE> Hope this helps,
>
> No. I have stata 9.2 and the data import works very well. So I doubt that it
> is "not supported". If you check the help you will see hints that 9 works.
>
> Albrecht, how do your data look like and what is the exact use of your
> read.dta?

Did you check the sources?  The source for read.dta explicitly checks for 
VERSION_5 ... VERSION_8 and otherwise says

"not a Stata version 5-8 .dta file"

so at least as far as file formats are concerned, 'K. Elo' was quite 
correct.

According to http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?dta, Stata now writes in
'format-114'.  read.dta expects only versions 113, 111 and earlier.
There is very little difference between formats 113 and 114, so it should 
be easy to modify read.dta to cope.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595