SEER data download - "record too long"

[emily taylor]

I have tried downloading the US county population data from the SEER database. It is in fixed ASCII text format. I tried downloading it using the "infix" command, which was successful for 16,000 observations. It then stops and says "record too long".

I wondered if anyone had any idea how to approach this problem?

Many thanks

[Nick Cox]

Can you give a precise URL and the exact command you used?

[emily taylor]

URL: Download U.S. County Population Data - SEER Population Data (cancer.gov) and downloaded the All States combined (adjusted) file from the County level Population Files - Single Year Age groups section.

Command used was:
infix year 1-4 str state 5-6 statefips 7-8 countyfips 9-11 registry 12-13 race 14 origin 15 sex 16 age 17-18 population 19-26 using "myfolder"

Thanks!

[emily taylor]

Nick Cox Sorry forgot to tag you in the response!

[Scott Merryman]

emily taylor

Perhaps there was an error unzipping the .gz file.

This appears to work (Windows):

clear
copy https://seer.cancer.gov/popdata/yr1969_2020.19ages/us.1969_2020.19ages.exe seer_data.exe , replace
shell seer_data.exe
infix year 1-4 str state 5-6 statefips 7-8 countyfips 9-11 registry 12-13 race 14 origin 15 sex 16 age 17-18 population 19-26 using "us.1969_2020.19ages.txt"
list in 1/2

. infix year 1-4 str state 5-6 statefips 7-8 countyfips 9-11 registry 12-13 race 14 origin 15 sex 16 age 17-18 population 19-26 using "us.1969_2020.19ages.txt",clear
(15,535,913 observations read)

. list in 1/2, ab(16)

     +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
     | year   state   statefips   countyfips   registry   race   origin   sex   age   population |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  1. | 1969      AL           1            1         99      1        9     1     0          159 |
  2. | 1969      AL           1            1         99      1        9     1     1          657 |
     +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[emily taylor]

@Scott Merrymah Thank you so much for your help - this has worked!