Re: st: Escaping left quote as argument of parse in split command

[Eric Booth <eric.a.booth@gmail.com>]

I'm not sure how to get the parse option of -split- to accept the single left quote, but you can get around it by using a function like -subinstr()- to replace the left quote with something else and then -split-, so:

**
replace id = subinstr(x, "`", "@", .)
split id, parse("@")
**

- Eric
__
Eric A. Booth
Public Policy Research Institute 
Texas A&M University
ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu
+979.845.6754



P.S. 
The part of the split.ado file that is choking is (using trace):

    - if `"`parse'"' == `""' | `"`parse'"' == `""""' {
    = if `""`""' == `""' | `""`""' == `""""' {
{ required

In trying to escape the single left quote in -split-, I had a copy/paste error and accidentally ran:

  split id, parse("\`\`"'')

which curiously gave the error:

"no room to add more variables
    Up to 32,000 variables are currently allowed, although you could reset the maximum using set maxvar; see help
    memory.
r(900); t=14.37 23:21:53"


Since string functions, like subinstr(), can work with the single left quote, it seems like it should be possible that -split- could work with it as well (I say that without knowing anything about the internal mechanics of the string functions like subinstr())




On Apr 3, 2012, at 10:45 PM, Florian Kuhn wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> in my dataset, I have a string variable “id” in which the left single quote ` is used to separate a first and second part of the id (the creators of the dataset were clearly not using Stata). For example, a typical entry in the column "id" would be 15`32. I am trying to recover both parts of the id as separate variables using the "split" command.
> 
> However, escaping the backtick does not seem to work:
> split id, parse("\`")
> gives the error message:
> { required
> r(100);
> 
> Am I missing something obvious here?
> Thanks,
> Florian 
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