Thanks to the SSC maintainer Kit Baum, two new commands are available on SSC: useold and saveascii. Both deal with unicode translation in Stata 14 (or younger).
useold works as an inline replacement for Stata’s regular use command. If the version of the Stata instance executing the command is 14 or younger, then it is checked if unicode translation is necessary and, if yes, unicode translate is executed on a temporary copy of the file before opening it. The default code page of the operating system is assumed as source encoding (which might be wrong and can be overridden via option).
You can install useold with:
ssc install useold
saveascii works as an inline replacement for Stata’s regular saveold command. It implements conversion functions as presented by Alan Riley here on Statalist.If the version of the Stata instance executing the command is 14 or younger, all unicode contents (data labels, variable names, variable labels, value label names and contents, characteristics names and contents) are converted to ASCII before running saveold. The default code page of the operating system is assumed as target encoding (which might be wrong and can be overridden via option).
You can install saveascii with:
ssc install saveascii
Both packages come with help files that contain more details on how to use them.
