error: r(498); variable X has leading or trailing blanks.

[karthick veerapandian]

Hello Forum Members,

I am doing reshaping of my data and I kept the data as required format. My "j" matrix variable is "crop name" which is a string one. Although I specified string option in the command, still facing a problem like

[reshape wide var1 var2 ..... varn, i(HHID) j(cropname) string
variable cropname has leading or trailing blanks
r(498);]



Kind advice would be highly regraded.

Thanks

[Andrew Musau]

The literal interpretation is that observations of the variable have spaces at the start, the end, or both. So you first need:

replace cropname= strtrim(cropname)

However, the problem may be more complicated than this. Stata variable names cannot contain spaces anywhere and cannot start with anything other than a letter or an underscore. Allowable characters are letters, numbers, and underscores.

help naming conventions

As usual, screenshots are not as helpful as you might think. If the above advice does not resolve your problem, please present a data example using the dataex command (see FAQ Advice #12 on these points).

[karthick veerapandian]

Hello Musau, Thank you for your kind response. I think I have committed some mistakes on the dataset. If I still face that issue I will do ask as you suggested. Thanks.