st: Re: string

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

...
You may want to try out -reclink- available from SSC (-findit reclink-) . It 
uses the bigram string comparator to assess the degree of match between fields. 
If you have lots of short strings, you may want to adjust the minbigram option 
downward to ensure more matches.

Michael Blasnik (author of reclink)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Viktor Slavtchev" <viktor.slavtchev@uni-jena.de>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 9:48 AM
Subject: st: string



> Dear list,
> I want to merge two files where the common variable is a string (names of 
> cities). However, there are non systematic differences in the notions.
> For example, you can find: "Berlin" in the first file but " Berlin" in the 
> second. In other cases you can find "Rome" and "Roma,IT". Or "Paris, FR" and 
> "Paris/FR"
> I was tot able to find any systematics in the notion. I have over 40.000 
> unique observations.
> How can I search for substrings in Stata? For example, for "*Rom*", the 
> largest match between "Rome" and "Roma,IT".
> I think this could help to solve some problems. Or does anybody know a better 
> way to deal with such kind of 'bad' data?
> thanks
> viktor
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