Thanks Mike, Zhiqiang, and Friedrich for your help. One other issue. On either Zhiqiang's or Friedrich's solutions, the result for country names with one or two asterisks is to delete the asterisks (as desired, thanks), but to leave a trailing blank, so that:
Albania*
becomes
Albania_
where _ is not an underscore but simply a left-shifted blank that is not the same as:
Albania
in another data set that I want to merge with this data set.
So when I do
mmerge country using otherdataset
and then sort _merge and clist _merge country
I get Albania in one data set and Albania_ in the second data set, with the merged data set now having both, while they should be matched. Any help would be appreciated.
Ric Uslaner
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