Re: st: using regex

[Steven Samuels <sjsamuels@gmail.com>]

Actually, a better one-line regex solution is:

gen fips =real(regexs(1)) if regexm(code,"^([0-9][0-9]?)[0-9][0-9] 
[0-9]$")

The previous version would return a 1 or 2 digit value for incorrectly  
formed codes such as "123456", "A1234", "1234B"


Steve


On Dec 2, 2010, at 5:58 PM, Steven Samuels wrote:


The regular expression solution is:

gen fips = real(regexs(1)) if regexm(x,"([0-9][0-9]?)[0-9][0-9][0-9]")


Steve

Steven J. Samuels
sjsamuels@gmail.com
18 Cantine's Island
Saugerties NY 12477
USA
Voice: 845-246-0774
Fax:    206-202-4783



On Dec 2, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Rijo John wrote:

Hi statlist,

I have a string variable (code) with state and county codes merged.
For example, the observation 12001 indicate that the first 2 digits
are state codes and the remaining 3 digits are county codes. I want to
create a new variable (fips) only with the state code.  I use the
following

gen fips = regexs(0) if(regexm(code, "[0-9][0-9]"))

and it works fine when the code contains 5 digits. But if a particular
state code is only 1 digit and thereby the string "code" only has a
total of 4 digits the trick above does not work. In such cases I want
to only extract the first digit.
Can someone help?

Thanks.
Rijo.
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