Appending multiple files

[Frank Rowen]

Hi all,

I have 135 .dta files on a folder each for one month from 2004m1 to 2018m12. The files are called Emp200401.dta, Emp200402.dta ...

I would like to append all of them into one master dataset. I tried doing this using:

local fnames: dir "U:\Data\EmpCounts" files "*"
foreach file of local fnames {
append using `r(files)', all
}

But I recieve the following message:

invalid file specification
r(198);

Any advice on how to append the file into one dataset would be greatly appreciated.

[Wouter Wakker]

In your foreach line you set the values of your local to be referred to as file, so they can be called with `file'. Try this.

cd "U:/Data/EmpCounts"
local fnames: dir "U:/Data/EmpCounts" files "*"
foreach file of local fnames{
        append using "`file'"
        }

[Frank Rowen]

That works, thank you very much for your help!

[Baladevan Rangaraju]

Hi:

I thought I would learn/practice this. So I created 3 dummy data sets called dummy1.dta, dummy2.dta and dummy3.dta, and adopted the code given by Wouter Walker.

cd "/Users/bala/Documents/dummies"
local fnames: dir "/Users/bala/Documents/dummies" files "*"
foreach file of local fnames{
append using "`file'"
}

But I receive this error:

file .DS_Store not found
r(601);

The files are there and I am able to append them manually one by one. Can someone please point out where I am going wrong?

Thank you.

[Nils Enevoldsen]

There's a hidden file named .DS_Store in that directory that is a macOS system file rather than a Stata dataset. The simplest tweak would be to change "*" to "*.dta".

[Baladevan Rangaraju]

Hi Nils, it's working fine now, and I have learnt a new lesson. Thank you so very much for the help.