Proper display of foreign language (Arabic/Urdu - Right to Left) using Stata 16

[Fahad Mirza]

Hello everyone,

Hope everything is well.

I have come across this rather possibly minor problem which I would like to the community to help out with or if the official StataCorp Team can look into it.

I have the following official text below

Over here it we look at the far right side of the image, we see that it starts with a digit (This is correctly displayed in Excel). However, when i merge the contents of this excel file with a Stata dataset, I end up with the following problem:

Everything is fine except, the number which is supposed to be to the starting digit ends up being the last. Can anyone kindly help out in resolving this problem?

I would also like to add here that after merging with my Stata dataset, and when I export the merged data to xlsx, the text displays properly. It is only in Stata for some reason that it appears the way it does.

I hope I was clear in explaining my problem. Feel free to let me know if you require further explanation.


P.S. I used the import excel command to import the excel file before merging

[Andrew Musau]

See https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...dow-and-hebrew

I guess that Urdu like Hebrew is read from right to left. I don't think that there is a problem with the import, this will just be a display issue. It should display OK in the results window, e.g, running the command

list var in 10

[Fahad Mirza]

Andrew Musau thank you for the quick response! much appreciated. Yes, urdu/arabic is read from right to left just like hebrew. I thought this may be some sort of encoding problem but yes you are right and as I mentioned in my original post, exporting results to excel displays text correctly.