Nick Cox
>
> Rio, Martin
>
> > I would like to specify a command to tell me the position
> > in a string of the
> > first character that is not a space. Example:
> >
> > " one" would yield 1
> > " two" would yield 2
> > " three" would yield 3
> > and so on...
> >
> > Just so you know why in the world I'd want to do this, the
> > number of spaces
> > determines hierarchy in my dataset. I was thinking of using
> > the index
> > function, but I'm not sure how to specify 'not a space' for
> > the second
> > argument.
>
> By my count the "o" in " one" is at position 2,
> etc. using the Stata convention which is to start at 1.
>
> It seems however that you may want to start
> counting at 0. As the difference is obvious,
> I will just look at start 1.
>
> One way to do this to get the number of leading
> spaces from
>
> length(string) - length(ltrim(string))
>
> and to add 1.
>
> Alternatively,
>
> index(string, ltrim(string))
>
> is another way to step towards what you
> want.
>
> I don't know a way to specify "not a space"
> directly.
I do, actually: it's
!= " "
but I don't think that helps here, without
putting it a loop, which we wish to avoid
mightily in problems like these.
Nick
[email protected]
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