.dta file corrupt Error r(688)

[miina waratani]

I exported EpiData file to Sata. The message from EpiData at the time of export said that file export successful. But when I tried to open the file in Stata 13, I got the following message.

.dta file corrupt
The marker </timestamp> was not found in the file where it was expected to be.
This means that the file was written incorrectly or that the file has
subsequently become damaged.
r(688);

Can someone please help?

Miina Waratani

[Marcos Almeida]

Welcome to the Stata Forum / Statalist


You wish to take a look at dtaverify, here.

[miina waratani]

Hello Marcos,
Thank you so much for responding. I ran the dtaverify command and got the below message. Can you please tell me what to do next to correct the file?

dtaverify oncho_2016_Demographic.dta
(file "oncho_2016_Demographic.dta" is .dta-format 117 from Stata 13)

1. reading and verifying header
release is 117
byteorder LSF
K (# of vars) is 14
N (# of obs) is 3
label length 16 |Demographic Data|
date length 17 |22 11 2017 09:31<|
SERIOUS ERROR: |/timestamp><| found where |</timestamp>| expected
Stopping; this error prevents continuing to check for other errors. Serious
errors detected

[Nick Cox]

I suggest you take this up with EpiData.

[miina waratani]

Hi NIck, so this is an EpiData related problem. Is this a common problem, I mean have you come across a fair number of people facing this issue? Thank you

[miina waratani]

I figured out what the problem was. The date format of my pc is set to Japan format. The data in Japan format is yyyy/mm/dd.

But the date format in stata is the other way round, dd/mm/yyyy.

As the data entry was done on a pc with Japan date format, the data exported to Stata was not compatible with the Stata date format. And thus the error.

I changed my pc date format to dd/mm/yyyy, then reentered the data into EpiData and exported it to Stata. I managed to open the data in Stata without any problem.

[Marcos Almeida]

Thank you for sharing the way you tackled the issue. Surely, this will be helpful to people under a similar situation.