USECSPRO: Features and limitations

This section documents the features supported and not supported during conversion. Most of the limitations are due to the deficiency of the target format (Stata dataset) rather then software implimentation.
  • Hierarchical data - supported, user can (and must) specify a data level during most import operations.
  • Data label - supported, record name is used as the dataset label in the resulting Stata dataset.
  • Variable names - fully supported (identical naming conventions), automatically converted to lowercase to match traditional Stata variable naming.
  • Variable labels - fully supported and imported.
  • Value labels - partially supported with the following limitations:
    • only the first set of labels is used if multiple label sets are defined for a variable. This is the most common case.
    • interval labels (no equivalent in Stata) are converted to discrete labels (when possible, see explanation)
    • non-integer values are not labelled (not possible in Stata)
  • Missing values - supported. The three special CSPro values reserved to denote missingness are converted to Stata's extended missing values using the following mapping:
    • DEFAULT->.a,
    • NOTAPPL->.b,
    • MISSING->.c
  • Decimals for numeric variables, including implied decimals - supported. Some CSPro files store data without decimal separator. -usecspro will determine the position of the implied decimal point from the field properties declared in the data dictionary file.
  • Leading zeroes - not supported.
  • Long strings - not supported (Stata's limit is 244 characters per string variable max).