Illegal panel structure

[paues]

When running this line of code

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PageLoad imp.txt delim=tab na="NA"

I get an error message "Illegal panel structure SERIES01 is nested within subsequent dimensions of the panel structure." What does it mean? What can I do about it? The series seem to be imported just fine - an unstructured panel much similar (except for the number of series and observations) to what I get by running this line of code

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PageLoad fb.txt delim=tab na="NA"

[EViews Gareth]

EViews' automatic detection routines appear to be thinking that it is a 3-dimensional panel, when it is, in fact, a 2-dimensional. You could modify your line to be:

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PageLoad imp.txt delim=tab na="NA" @id series02 series03

[paues]

I haven't had a chance to try out your suggestion yet, but I wonder: Is the data in imp.txt a 2-dimensional panel, as you claim? Isn't it 3-dimensional? There are 4 columns and each combination of the first 3 columns corresponds to a unique value in the fourth column. That should make it 3-dimensional. Or is my logic (or my understanding of the data in imp.txt) faulty?

To give you a sense of what my next step would be (in case my approach here might be less than optimal), I want to make a table identical to the text file, that is 4 columns and ~900 rows (and many other tables from similar text files with varying number of columns and rows such as the attached fb.txt).

[EViews Gareth]

I believe series02 and series03 perfectly predict series01. i.e. they are enough to uniquely identify the observations. Are there combinations of series02 and series03 that having varying values of series01?

[paues]

No, you are correct. There are no combinations of series02 and series03 that have varying values of series01. Thank you. But that still begs the question why this causes an error. While I can see that nested series would be a problem if one tried to apply a structure to the page, this page is unstructured. And, as the code below shows, it is possible to create a similar page consisting of only ones (where the problem would arguably be more prevalent) both by creating the series in EViews and by loading my new text file ones.txt.

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pagecreate u 10 series series01=1 series series02=1 series series03=1 series series04=1

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pageload ones.txt delim=tab na="NA"

[paues]

Moreover, as I pointed out in my first post, the series in imp.txt are imported just fine. When I elaborate on my first code snippet to get the below, it works just as I intended (as do all the subsequent steps) except from the error message in the log.

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!errbefore=@errorcount !maxerrbefore=@maxerrcount setmaxerrs !maxerrbefore+1 pageload imp.txt delim=tab na="na" seterrcount !errbefore setmaxerrs !maxerrbefore

So the real question seems to be, why does this cause an error message in EViews? (And thereby, this topic is perhaps be better suited for the "Bug Report" forum.)

[EViews Gareth]

The data can be brought in fine, and there is no reason why you can't have those series in a workfile. What you cannot do is use those series to structure it as a 3-d panel. For some reason, EViews is detecting it as a 3-d panel anyway, and hence throwing the error.

[paues]

Is there someway to specify in the pageload command that it should be imported as an unstructured page?

[EViews Gareth]

Yes:

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PageLoad imp.txt delim=tab na="NA" @freq u

[paues]

Thank you!