Re: st: data management issue (names listed differently)

[Rufus Peabody <rufus.peabody@gmail.com>]

Eva,

Much thanks for the advice.  I am still wondering how I can merge with  
a variable that has a mixture of CorrectSpelling and WrongSpelling.   
Cleaning it up manually is extremely time-consuming since there are  
thousands of observations.

Thanks,
Rufus

On Jul 2, 2008, at 8:42 AM, Eva Poen wrote:


> Rufus,
>
> are there too many schools/spellings to do it manually (i.e. -replace
> school = "USC" if inlist(school, "Southern Cal","SouthCal")- )?
>
> In any case, I would recommend that you clean up your school variable
> to make your task as easy as possible. That includes stripping of
> leading/trailling blanks using -trim()-, and converting everything to
> lower case (-lower()-). -itrim()- will reduce multiple, consecutive
> internal blanks to one for you. All of this will help in reducing the
> number of replacements you have to do.
>
> As a general strategy, you could compile a list (or data set) of all
> the spellings you have, after cleaning up. If you go for a data set,
> it could have two variables, CorrectSpelling and WrongSpelling. It
> should then be possible to use -merge- to add the correct spelling to
> data sets where the wrong spelling is present. For this to work you
> need to make sure that there are no ambiguous wrong spellings, i.e.
> abbreviations that may relate to more than one school.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Eva
>
>
>
>
> 2008/7/2 Rufus Peabody <rufus.peabody@gmail.com>:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I'm working with a dataset that contains a few variable containing  
> > the name
> > of different college football teams.  The problem is, they are not  
> > spelled
> > consistently (i.e. Miami(FL) and Miami Florida; USC and Southern  
> > Cal).  In
> > many cases the spelling differs only in that there is an extra  
> > space after
> > the school name for some.  What I'd like to do (and I'm pretty sure  
> > is
> > possible) is create a master file with all the school names and  
> > possible
> > spellings, which I can then somehow merge with my original dataset  
> > (and any
> > future datasets with these teams) to create a consistent spelling.   
> > How do I
> > go about doing this? Specifically, if I have, say three variables  
> > containing
> > spelling 1, spelling 2, and spelling 3 of a school, and I want to use
> > spelling 1 in another dataset, how can I merge with a variable that  
> > has some
> > schools with spellling 1 and others with spelling 2 or 3?
> >
> > Thanks a lot,
> > Rufus
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