As the original author of -split-, I can see a fairly painless
way to use that command. The trick is to see that you definitely
do _not_ want to parse on spaces, as not only is there a variable
number of spaces between substrings, but also spaces separate
elements within substrings. But each substring ends with
a right parenthesis. Now
split mystring, p(")")
parses on right parentheses, but will delete them, but that
is trivial. You may want to put them back, for which
foreach v in `r(varlist)' {
replace `v' = `v' + ")"
}
-- or you prefer to take out the left parentheses, for which
foreach v in `r(varlist)' {
replace `v' = subinstr(`v', "(","",.)
}
Note here that r(varlist) is left behind by -split- as a list
of the names of the variables it creates, but will be zapped by
the next r-class command. You can do it directly by naming those
variables if you prefer.
Nick
[email protected]
P.S. I follow the terminology that () are parentheses, []
brackets and {} are braces. Using brackets in the wide
sense either creates ambiguity or commits you to needing
to say round, square and curly to disambiguate.
Radu Ban
> I have a string variable that looks like this:
>
> mystring
> (1 2 3) (1 2 2) (7 8 9) (1 3 4)
> (2 3 4) (1 2 3) (10 11 12)
>
> etc. The numbers inside the brackets are made up. The problem is that
> the number of spaces between brackets is not constant. Also the number
> of brackets is not constant across observations. I want to split this
> variable so that each bracket is contained in its own variable, i.e.
>
> split1 split2 split3 split4
> (1 2 3) (1 2 2) (7 8 9) (1 3 4)
> (2 3 4) (1 2 3) (10 11 12) <blank>
>
> I've tried the -split- command, with various numbers of spaces as the
> parse character, but that doesn't work, i.e. it doesn't split if i
> specify too many blanks, or it creates blank observations if i specify
> too few blanks.
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