It is worth having a look at the file in an editor. If you are not going to save it again, even Word will do, but change the font to Courier. You should see the header information all lined up and then the data all lined up with maximum 80 characters per line. It is pretty easy to see if the file is corrupted (e.g. it got only partially copied from somewhere or was edited with something like Word.
I do this all the time if I have a problem with a data file and the problem has always been one of the following:
1. The data came from EpiInfo - EpiInfo forgives a lot of errors in data sets and won't tell you about them 2. There is garbage part of the way through the file - indicates a disk error or that the computer was shut off before the file was completely saved 3. There is an extra blank line at the end or the very last line is not complete or has extra spaces at the end
Of course, if any of those are true, Epidata Entry won't read the file either.
The other potential problem is a corrupt .chk file, although there is a pretty clear error message about that in my experience.
Good luck...
(by the way, a few of us are quite able to diagnose a .rec file problem, but that means sending your data to a stranger)
Jamie
On 2012-05-24, Hans wrote:
Mohd:
Have you tried to start everything again from scratch, ie, doing a reinstall of EpiData Analysis? I know, last-resort proposal, but it doesn't seem that anything else anybody proposes is fixing it, thus let's hope it is just some corrupt file.
Hans