st: RE: handling the quote character stored in a string variable

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

gen type_corr = "expression" if marqueur_type2 == `"""'

or 

... if marqueur_type2 == char(32) 

Stata is struggling to see your expression your way because of the dual role of ", as a string delimiter and a literal character. Therefore, you either need a different string delimiter `"  "' or to avoid using the literal character. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Charles Vellutini

I have a string variable ("marqueur" in the code below) which contains a single quotation mark for certain observations (the data is from Google's Adwords and keywords are enclosed in quotation marks when the correspondence type is based on the exact expression). However, Stata rejects a test on the quotation mark used as a character.  I get the error message "too few quotes" when I run the following code:

      gen type_corr = "expression" if marqueur_type2 == """

and the data is like this :


                               marqueur

obs 1                     [

obs 2                     "

obs 3                     r

obs 4                     "

etc.

Any idea on how to run tests on the quotation mark stored in a string variable ?


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