Unusual too many variables error

[John Michael Perdue]

I am using Stata IC 15. I open a file and receive an error message that I do not have enough room for more variables and that up to 2048 are allowed, etc etc.

Yet, I am pretty sure that I do not have 2048 variables in the file that I want to open. Is there any other reason why I might be getting this error?

[Clyde Schechter]

I have never heard of this before, and the only thing I can think of that might cause this is a corrupted file. But I think the first thing I would do is send this file to a colleague who is running Stata 15 SE or MP and ask him or her to open it and tell you how many variables it contains.

[William Lisowski]

Perhaps the describe using command will give you the information you need without running into the limit on the number of variables in memory. Something like

describe using "yourdatasetname", short

may do the job, using the short option only so you don't have to see a listing of all the variables. And if this command fails, then the possibility of corruption seems more likely.

[John Michael Perdue]

Thank you gentleman for your responses. I beleive that the data is indeed as large as it says. I will probably have to upgrade :-)

[Mike Lacy]

I think you can avoid the upgrade cost by just bringing in a subset of the variables you're interested in. Get a list of the variable names with -describe using "filename.dta"-, and then once you know the names of the variables of interest, you could do -use var1-var10 var999 etc.using "filename.dta-" I've never actually done this, but it's my impression that Stata IC can use a subset of a too-large file in this way.