Re: st:how to delete anything in the bracket for a string variable

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Tirthankar's kind of solution is much to be preferred, but there is no
reason to suppose that -substr()- does not work here

In Amanda's examples, this should work:

replace name = substr(name, 1, strpos(name, "(") - 1)

This is not in one-to-one correspondence with Tirthankar's solution,
as it assumes that the important stuff comes first, and it also zaps
anything after the ")", but the solution is then just more
complicated, not impossible.

Many people call () parentheses, sometimes round brackets; [] brackets
or square brackets, and {} braces or curly brackets.

Either way, -trim()- is also useful here to remove any leading or
trailing spaces.

Nick

On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 6:05 AM, Tirthankar Chakravarty
<tirthankar.chakravarty@gmail.com> wrote:

> This should work:
>
> ***********************************************
> clear*
> input id   str50     name
> 1         "John (joined before 2005)"
> 2         "Jenny"
> 3         "Kai (joined in 2006; left in 2008)"
> 4         "Tom (inconsistent dates)"
> end
> replace name = regexr(name, "\((.)+\)", "")
> li
> ***********************************************
>
> T
>
> On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 9:17 PM, Amanda Fu <mandy.fu1@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I wonder if someone can give me some suggestion on delete anything in
>> the bracket for a string variable. A string variable in my data set
>> has some notes in bracket for part of the observations. I want to
>> remove the brackets and anything in them
>>
>> An example is like:
>> -------------------------
>> id        name
>> 1         John (joined before 2005)
>> 2         Jenny
>> 3         Kai (joined in 2006; left in 2008)
>> 4         Tom (inconsistent dates)
>> -------------------------.......
>> I would like to delete anything in the () for the variable "name" so
>> that only names are kept. But the content in the brackets are not the
>> same. I think that causes the -substr- does not work for this purpose.

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