st: Removing Spaces from Variable Labels

[Dan Connor <dan.connor@politics.ox.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

I have a series of survey-derived datasets, with about 700 variables in each. I need to merge them, which I can do. The problem is that the variable names are uninformative (they're called v1, v2, v3...), and are not in the same order in each dataset (eg, v3 might correspond to gender in one dataset, and level of education in another). Fortunately, the variable names are the same when the survey question was the same. So I'm planning to just change the variable name to the variable label, using this routine:

foreach var of varlist * {
local x : variable label 'v'
rename 'v' 'x'
label variable 'x' "'v'"
}

However (and here's the part I need help with), the variable labels contain spaces, sometimes special characters, and sometimes are longer than 32 characters. This means that they are invalid names, so my loop above won't work. Is there a good way to remove these spaces and such from the labels before I run the above loop?

Thanks-

Dan

---
Dan B. F. Connor
dan.connor@politics.ox.ac.uk


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