error (fwd)
On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Cere M. Davis wrote:
Hi folks, I've got this funny problem with R's foreign library when reading stata files. One file consistently produces vector out of memory errors after gobbling up 2.7G of memory. I parsed through the read.dta function and figured out where the error occurs and the description is below. I am running R-1.8.1 on Debian stable system glibc2.2 kernel 2.4.24. R is is compiled from source as a shared library. The file that I am reading is only 172M in size. The system I am using has 4G of free memory and 8 G of swap so this doesn't seem to be a problem for lack of free memory. See Below.
I though this bug had already been fixed (Stefano Iacus reported it to me a while back). The problem occurs when a variable has a set of factor names assigned, but that set of names is not present in the file -- it was not clear from the otherwise excellent Stata documentation that this is possible in a valid .dta file. Obviously the fix is not completely effective. I'll look into it. -thomas Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle