Among other solutions, Friedrich Huebler has already suggested
-subinstr()-, which is what occurred to me too.
Michael's approach works and if you have MS Word and Excel on your
computer -- which is not automatic for Stata users -- it may even be
quicker than rummaging around in the Stata manuals or on-line to find a
solution. Nevertheless it is pretty indirect compared with use of string
functions.
At some point it is a good idea for those who use Stata a lot just to
browse through the list of functions and see what they are missing.
Nick
[email protected]
Michael McCulloch
Don't know how to do this in Stata, but one approach would be:
1. export from Stata to a text file
2. open with MS WORD, and remove the asterisks doing a global
Find-and-Replace,
3. copy and paste from WORD to EXCEL,
4. save as *.csv
5. re-importing the data using infile or insheet.
Ric Uslaner
>I have several data sets (from the World Bank Governance indicators)
>where the names of countries sometimes have one or two asterisks
>following their names, e.g.:
>
>Afghanistan
>Albania**
>Armenia
>Azerbaijan*
>
>etc. I want to get rid of the asterisks to merge them with a master
>data set. Aside from editing each name individually, I presume that
>there is an easier way that I just don't know.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
