Hi there,
If the only issue is that there are too many spaces in your data (so "Fidelity Bank" is stored as "Fidelity Bank", then the following should work:
replace bankname = itrim(bankname)
You might also want to look at other string functions. If you have leading or trailing blanks, you want -trim-. You might also want -lower- to deal with cases.
Hope this helps.
Howie
________________________________________
From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sue [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 11:38 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: string variable
Dear all,
I was trying to do some simple data management with a string variable.
More specifically, I did:
insheet using bankyears.csv, clear
keep if bankname == "Fidelity Bank" | bankname == "Citibank"
which dropped all observations. When I looked at the data, it turned
out that the width of the single space between words was different (it
was wider in stata than in my editor, if this makes sense) although it
was still just one space. I've tried
replace bankname = subinstr(bankname, " ", "", .)
which didn't work. I could encode the variable then single out the
numeric value of the observations that I want to keep, but I was
wondering if there was a non-manual way around this. If anyone has
advice on this, I'd appreciate it.
*
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*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
