Re: st: substring help

[Justin Wheeler <jpw3@duke.edu>]

If the county names are sometimes two words, you could do this to avoid 
truncating them:

gen cnty = word(cntyname,1)
gen cnty2 = word(cntyname,2) if word(cntyname,3)~=""
replace cnty = cnty + " " + cnty2 if cnty2~=""

Justin

--On Tuesday, June 07, 2005 10:32 AM -0400 Heather Gold 
<heg2001@med.cornell.edu> 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.
>
> Thanks,
> Heather
>
>
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