EViews.com

Posted: **Fri May 29, 2026 9:46 pm**

I want to import the attached (minimal) text files and unstack them into dated pages with two series: a and b. The text files differ with respect to the value column. The first file (test.txt) has variation in both the name and time dimension (i.e. all unique values), the second (test2.txt) has variation in the name dimension and the third (test3.txt) has variation in the time dimension.

test.txt

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name	period	value
a	2000	1
a	2001	2
b	2000	3
b	2001	4

test2.txt

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name	period	value
a	2000	1
a	2001	1
b	2000	2
b	2001	2

test3.txt

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name	period	value
a	2000	1
a	2001	2
b	2000	1
b	2001	2

I thought that the following two steps would have worked for all the files.

First load the page and unstack it

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pageload .\test.txt
pageunstack name dateid @ value

to get the series valuea and valueb (as well as a series dateid, a pool name and a group value) and then do some cleanup

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delete name value dateid
rename value* *

And this does work for the first two files, test.txt and test2.txt. But for test3.txt the first step doesn't create the series valuea and valueb (nor the group value) but instead a single series value. And then the second step naturally results in an empty page (albeit correctly dated).

What to do?

Posted: **Fri May 29, 2026 11:17 pm**

The issue is that because there is no between cross-section variation (a and b are identical), when you stack, EViews does the "smart" thing in realising you don't need two different value series, so it condenses down to a single series, called value. Then when you do the tidyup step, you delete it.

Really the only way around this is to test whether there are any series called VALUE[X] before doing the tidyup.

Posted: **Sat May 30, 2026 2:17 am**

And then loop over the pool name and create the missing series? Something like this:

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pageload .\test.txt
pageunstack name dateid @ value
if @isempty(@wlookup("value", "group")) then
	%crossids = name.@crossids
	for %crossid {%crossids}
		copy value value{%crossid}
	next
endif
delete name value dateid
rename value* *

Posted: **Sat May 30, 2026 6:00 am**

Yeah, that’s not a bad way to do it.

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Simple pageunstack gone wrong

Simple pageunstack gone wrong

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Re: Simple pageunstack gone wrong

Re: Simple pageunstack gone wrong