Re: st: RE: RE: extract middle of string

[Ronnie Babigumira <rb.glists@gmail.com>]

Thanks to Justin White, Jean Ries and Nick Cox for their responses.

I will settle with the solution offered by Jean and Nicks because it is shorter

Many thanks,

Ronnie

Ps: For the record, this was not one of those.."the manuals are too big I wont be bothered to flip through them" 
questions. I had an idea but it was long and hopeless so I figured someone might have a one-liner to save my day and 
indeed there was one (still, it is not an excuse for not reading the manuals or not checking the FAQs in the case of my 
question earlier today) :-)


Nick Cox wrote:

> Note that there is no longer a need to specify 
> variable type to -generate- string variables, although
> that does no harm. 
> This is in essence the same question as one 
> raised by Ari Friedman on 11 October and can 
> be attacked directly without any need for reversing. 
> The length of a string is given by -length()-,  
> so everything but the last two characters is 
> substr(x,1,length(x) - 2) 
> and everything between the second and the 
> last two characters is one substring with 
> one character fewer: 
> substr(x, 2, length(x) - 3) 
> At some stage every serious Stata user has 
> to browse the functions sections of the manual
> carefully, dry though they are! 
> Nick 
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 
> White, Justin
>  
> > Try this:
> >
> > gen str X2 = substr(x,2,.)
> > gen str x_2 = reverse(X2)
> > gen str x3 = substr(x_2,2,.)
> > gen str x_3 = reverse(x3)
> >
> > drop X2 x_2 x3
> >
> > X_3 would be the variable you are ultimately interested in.  
> > Then rename
> > X_3 to whatever you wish.
>  
> Ronnie Babigumira
>  
> > I have a string variable that looks like this
> >
> >             x
> >   161011000AT
> >   161011000CN
> > 1610110012CN
> >
> >
> > I am interested in what lies between the first and the last two
> > characters
> >
> > I could have used
> >
> > gen str10 = subst(x, 2, 8) but that would not work for the last
> > observation. How can I simply drop the first character, 
> > and last two charters in x
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