Special letters in Vietnamese become "???" on VHLSS Data

Question

I have a dataset named 'vhlss' that uses a certain font. Somehow, when I import it into Stata, the text appears like this. Even though I've adjusted the font settings in Stata, and it's Stata 18.

I wish to know how to revert the text to normal without having to set it line by line because the dataset has too many questions to manually adjust each one

Answer 1

TL;DR: I can't reproduce your problem.

I tried replicating your issue by creating the following .csv file:

name
Tuđi
Giêi Tănh
Nhung Trương Thị Kiều

and importing it into Stata:

import delimited "/Users/moritz/Downloads/test.csv", varnames(1) clear

This import method uses UTF-8 font encoding by default and all characters show up just fine in Stata. I even tried every other available font encoding and none looked like your screenshot (which doesn't look like Stata to begin with).

I also went into Stata's Data Editor settings and played with the data display fonts but none of those gave any issues. Please let us know what file format you are using (or better post your data) so we can help you better.

Finally, since you used the readstata13 tag (which is an R command), I saved this test data set to .dta and imported it into R with read.dta13() (the command of the tagged package) and again, the import went completely smoothly:

FWIW, this link might help with some Vietnamese alphabet specific problems.