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Is a perfectly good coding sheet consisting for three line for the column SEX.
M,Male
F,Female
?,Indeterminate
The codes, the first entry on each line of a coding sheet, must either be integers or strings. Leading zeros on numeric integer codes are ignored, so 001 and 01 and 1 are interpreted the same (and appear as 1). Codes can also be reals (with decimal points) or standardized string values .
M,Male
F,Female
?,Indeterminate
The coding sheet codes must either be integers, reals, or stringsincluding strings of numbers that include decimal points. Thus, Flr and Fil could be context codes and 01.1, 1.1, and 1.2.1 could be also all be codes that would be expressed as strings. However, string codes must match exactly. Thus, with a string code flr and Flr are different and 01.1 and 1.1 are different. The values and optional descriptions can have embedded spaces and can include most special characters (this is not true for ontologies, but never mind that for now). The values and optional descriptions cannot have double quotes within them (if you must they must appear as two quotes in a row"") and if they include a comma then the whole value needs to be enclosed in double quotes. The order of the lines (and hence the values) within the coding sheet doesn't matter. The codes need not be in numerical or alphabetical order.
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