read_stata issue

[benjello]

I have the following error when reading a bunch of stata file

ValueError: Version of given Stata file is not 104, 105, 108, 113 (Stata 8/9), 114 (Stata 10/11), 115 (Stata 12), 117 (Stata 13), or 118 (Stata 14)

I do not know the way to check the stata version of the file but I suspect it is fairly recent.
Opening the file with stata 12 and saving it solves the problem.
But I do not have stata installed on my machine and I cannot do that everytime.
How can I check the version of the file ?
Is there anybody kind enough to have a look at the problematic file (personnal email please) ?
I suspect encoding problem. data is a sample of a french survey with many string with accent etc.

Thanks for help

[jreback]

try with encoding='utf-8' and see if that works

[benjello]

Same error.

[jreback]

this seems peculiar to your case and out of scope of pandas

[torstees]

I have the same problem with DTA files generated by SAS. Stata users have no problem opening these files, and neither do I if I use R, but I can't open them up using pandas (v 0.18.1)

[jorisvandenbossche]

@torstees Can you provide a reproducible example? (eg example file that fails to open)

[torstees]

Here you go. I included a minimal python and R script along with the output I'm seeing on current OSX and a recent linux system. The dataset was exported with the current version of SAS using proc export. It contains a simple list of ids and nothing else.
testdata.zip

[benjello]

There is a huge probability that the stata file I do use are generated by SAS since it is the main software used by the french statistical institute. I tried @torstees data and got the same error.

[jorisvandenbossche]

cc @bashtage or @kshedden if you could have a look

[kshedden]

The dta file format code for the file supplied by @torstees is 111. According to the R docs here:

https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/foreign/html/read.dta.html

format 111 corresponds to Stata 7SE. But the SAS docs linked below state that SAS writes dta files compatible with Stata 8 and later.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acpcref/63184/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a003103776.htm

There is no mention of format version 111 in the Stata dta format docs:

http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?dta

[kshedden]

I also noticed that in the References section below:

https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/foreign/html/read.dta.html

they state that the spec for dta's written by Stata 7 is contained in the printed programming manual. I can't find it on-line.

[kshedden]

The small SAS program below exports a Stata dta file. You can then use Stata to check its version, with dtaversion tmp.dt. Under SAS 9.1 and Stata 14.1 I get:

. dtaversion tmp.dta
  (file "tmp.dta" is .dta-format 111 from Stata 7)

Here is the SAS program (you need to have a small "tmp.csv" file in the working directory):

libname mydata ".";

proc import datafile="tmp.csv"
    dbms=csv
    out=tmp;

proc export
    file="tmp.dta"
    dbms=stata replace;

run;