Re: st: substring help

[David Kantor <dkantor@jhu.edu>]

At 10:32 AM 6/7/2005 -0400, Heather Gold wrote:
> Dear Fellow Listers -
>
> Someone has probably figured this out previously, but I can't seem to find 
> exactly what I need in the archives or help...
>
> I have a string variable with county and state names merged as one string 
> 15 characters long. I need to get rid of the trailing state name.
> For example, I have:
>
> Genesee NY
> Bronx NY
> Queens NY
>
> And I want to have only:
> Genesee
> Bronx
> Queens
>
> I tried
>  gen cnty=substr(cntyname, -2,2)
>
> But that does the "opposite" of what I want, ie, returns "NY".
> Because the county name varies in length, I can't just do a substring of a 
> specific length, starting from the beginning of the variable.
>
> Shouldn't there be an obvious solution? I can't find it.
> [...]

Are the unwanted parts *always* the final 3 characters?  If so, the 
solution is easy.  (If not, it may be a very complicated matter, but I 
won't go into that.)

If you just want to trim off the final 3 characters...

gen byte len = length(cntyname)
gen cnty=substr(cntyname, 1, len-3)
drop len

----

You can probably squish this into one command:
gen cnty=substr(cntyname, 1, length(cntyname)-3)


HTH,
--David
David Kantor
Institute for Policy Studies
Johns Hopkins University
dkantor@jhu.edu
410-516-5404

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