to_stata: Fixed width strings in Stata .dta files are limited to 244 (or fewer) · Issue #16450 · pandas-dev/pandas (original) (raw)

Code Sample, a copy-pastable example if possible

import pandas frame = pandas.DataFrame({'A':['h'*250,'hi','hola']}) frame.to_excel("text.xlsx", index=False) frame.to_stata("test.dta")

Problem description

Raises the following error:

ValueError:
Fixed width strings in Stata .dta files are limited to 244 (or fewer)
characters. Column 'A' does not satisfy this restriction.

However this restriction seems to not exists in STATA, as the Excel file can be imported correctly
Open STATA, import the Excel file

import excel "C:\data\tesi\software\text.xlsx", sheet("Sheet1") firstrow clear

Now we can get the type of data in column 'A', and as you can see, it's str250. So STATA can store string longer than 244 characters

A str250 %250s A

Expected Output

File gets exported with the correct format and without problems

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS ------------------ commit: None python: 3.5.2.final.0 python-bits: 64 OS: Windows OS-release: 10 machine: AMD64 processor: Intel64 Family 6 Model 94 Stepping 3, GenuineIntel byteorder: little LC_ALL: None LANG: None LOCALE: None.None

pandas: 0.19.2
nose: 1.3.7
pip: 9.0.1
setuptools: 23.0.0
Cython: 0.24
numpy: 1.11.2
scipy: 0.18.1
statsmodels: None
xarray: None
IPython: 4.2.0
sphinx: 1.5.5
patsy: None
dateutil: 2.5.3
pytz: 2016.6.1
blosc: None
bottleneck: None
tables: 3.2.3.1
numexpr: 2.6.1
matplotlib: 1.5.3
openpyxl: 2.4.7
xlrd: 1.0.0
xlwt: None
xlsxwriter: None
lxml: 3.7.3
bs4: 4.5.3
html5lib: 0.999999999
httplib2: None
apiclient: None
sqlalchemy: None
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
jinja2: 2.8
boto: None
pandas_datareader: 0.2.1