Question

Does anyone know of an Open Source library for parsing/reading Stata files in .net? It is a tabular data format.

I plan to write an IDataReader based reader if no one has seen something that could be reused.

Answer 1

After an exhaustive search, I could not find a library for reading Stata files. I did end up writing an IDataReader implementation for Stata versions 5 to 12. I will see if I can post it to github.

One note for others: the IDataReader does not have a method to get a typed sbyte (int 8) which Stata uses, so if you need that value when implementing a reader with an IDataReader interface, you can return it through the GetInt16.

    // On the actual StataDataReader
    public sbyte GetSByte(int i) {}

    // This is the smallest int available on IDataReader
    // It will call GetSByte internally if that is the column type
    public short GetInt16(int i){}

I also added an in depth GetMissingValue since Stata can have numerous missing value codes. IsDBNull does not support any context information.

    public IMissingValue GetMissingValue(int i) {}