Dear Gretl community, I have a Gretl file, last saved in 2017, that I now can't open. I have updated my Gretl to 2019-build. Error message: First char of varname '_DAY' is bad (first must be alphabetical)

On Mon, 27 May 2019, Dagfinn Rime wrote: > Dear Gretl community, > > I have a Gretl file, last saved in 2017, that I now can't open. I have > updated my Gretl to 2019-build. > > Error message: > First char of varname '_DAY' is bad > (first must be alphabetical) > > a) can I download old version from somewhere? > b) is it an easy way to take a Gretl gdt-file and convert it to CSV? > > Thanks in advance It's very weird that you were able to create such a file in the first place. As far as I can remember, series identifiers beginning with an underscore have neve been legal in gretl, so I wonder how a file like that could have been written by gretl in the first place. Anyway: gdt files are just xml files, possibly gzipped. You can edit them directly with any text editor. For example (assuming you use windows, like 70% of gretl users does), try this: _____________________________________________________________________________ 1) locate the file data4-1.gdt from the "ramanathan" collection. On a typical windows install, its full path should be something like C:\Program Files\gretl\data\ramanathan\data4-1.gdt 2) open it with a text editor; WordPad, for example, will do beautifully (NotePad is a bit more awkward, since it botches line endings). You should see something like <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE gretldata SYSTEM "gretldata.dtd"> <gretldata version="1.3" name="data4-1" frequency="1" startobs="1" endobs="14" type="cross-section"> <description> DATA4-1: Data on single family homes in University City community of San Diego, in 1990. price = sale price in thousands of dollars (Range 199.9 - 505) sqft = square feet of living area (Range 1065 - 3000) bedrms = number of bedrooms (Range 3 - 4) baths = number of bathrooms (Range 1.75 - 3) </description> <variables count="4"> <variable name="price" ... 3) navigate down until you see the tag <variable name = "_DAY" and change it to something suitable (eg. "DAY") 4) save the file as text, with a .gdt extension. At that point, you should be able to open the file ok _____________________________________________________________________________ If you try the above on the file data3-14.gdt from the same collection, you'll just see garbage; that happens because that file is compressed (technically: gzipped), so you need to decompress it first. In order to do so, there are several tools you may use, a very nice one being 7zip (freely downloadable from https://www.7-zip.org/download.html) So you can open the file with the 7zip file manager, uncompress it to a location of yuor choice, and then edit it with WordPad. Hope this helps! ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti -------------------------------------------------------_______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list -- gretl-users(a)gretlml.univpm.it To unsubscribe send an email to gretl-users-leave(a)gretlml.univpm.it Website: https://gretlml.univpm.it/postorius/lists/gretl-users.gretlml.univpm.it/