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RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks


From   "Kwaku Damoah" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks
Date   Fri, 12 Aug 2011 06:40:35 -0000

Thanks Nick & Eric it has worked just fine
Kwaku

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 11 August 2011 17:56
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks

In addition to Eric's good advice, if the blanks really are just common or
garden spaces " ", then 

. replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, " ", "", .)

is the way to go, similarly to his bottom line. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Eric Booth

If by 'blanks' you mean 'spaces' then first take a look at -help trim-.
Sometimes blanks or spaces are other, invisible characters.  To find those I
use a combination of -charlist-, -ascii- (or -asciiplot-) all user-written
programs from SSC.  After installing these programs you can check for these
characters with something like:

***********!
replace myvar = trim(myvar)
charlist myvar
di "`r(ascii)'"
ascii      //compare the char list with what should be there
**or:
asciiplot
**let's say, you found that your string included invisible char 20, then:
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, "`=char(20)'" , "" , . )
************!

On Aug 11, 2011, at 10:28 AM, Kwaku Damoah wrote:

> Please can someone tell me how to remove embedded blanks from variables.

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