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Re: st: String Variable With Probable Extra Space, Problems with Trim
From
Scott Merryman <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: String Variable With Probable Extra Space, Problems with Trim
Date
Wed, 2 Jun 2010 13:14:27 -0500
You might find Nick Cox's -charlist- on SSC helpful (and -ascii- or
-asciiplot- as well).
Scott
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 12:52 PM, J Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have a variable of US state names that include what I think are some
> extra spaces at the front and at the end of the variable value.
> Instead of "California", I think the variable is " California ". I
> received the dataset in Excel and then saved it as a .csv file with
> Excel 2007.
>
> I say 'I think' above because I'm not 100% sure if there might be some
> character that I can't see that is not a space.
>
> I try using
> gen state1 = trim(state)
>
> but state1 continues to have " California " as a value instead of
> "California." This is super-weird, and I apologize I cannot provide
> information about what is going on.
>
> Might there be another way (other than trim) to extract the state name
> so that there are no spaces? I could look for a continuous group of
> letter characters, but this may face disadvantages for the two word
> states, e.g. "New Hampshire." Any other suggestions about fixing this
> problem?
>
> Thanks,
> JT
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