Re: st: RE: Convert string with special characters to lower case

[Jorge Eduardo Pérez Pérez <perez.jorge@ur.edu.co>]

Great idea, it almost works,but -proper- is confused after the
translation because it capitalizes letters if they are after special
characters. In this example, the character "i" after "ñ" is
capitalized:

clear all
input str15 nombre
"ZÚÑIGA"
end
gen nombre2=subinstr(nombre,char(209),char(241),.)
replace nombre2=subinstr(nombre2,char(218),char(250),.)
gen nombre3=lower(nombre2)
gen nombre4=proper(nombre2)
li

So I did this as a workaround:

clear all
input str15 nombre
"ZÚÑIGA"
end
gen nombre2=subinstr(nombre,char(209),char(241),.)
replace nombre2=subinstr(nombre2,char(218),char(250),.)
gen nombre3=lower(nombre2)
gen first=substr(nombre3,1,1)
gen rest=substr(nombre3,2,.)
replace first=upper(first)
gen nombre_ok=first+rest
li

Thanks a lot!
_______________________
Jorge Eduardo Pérez Pérez


On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> I think you need to set up a translation e.g. from char(209) to char(241) and _then_ apply -proper()-.
>
> How many problem characters are there? About 10? Sounds like a small program or -egen- function but at least the problem needs to be solved once only.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Jorge Eduardo Pérez Pérez
>
> I have some text in Spanish that includes accents and special
> characters in uppercase, e.g
> "ZUÑIGA", "RODRÍGUEZ"
> and I would like to convert it to proper case. Stata 12.1 in a Windows
> machine doesn't do it correctly: if I apply -proper- to the previous
> text, I get:
> "ZuÑiga", "RodrÍguez"
>
> The correct conversion could be achieved by getting the positions of
> the accented characters, replacing the accented versions of the
> characters with their unaccented versions using -subisntr- or -regex-,
> converting it to proper case, and then putting the accents back using
> the previous positions and -substr-. However, this would require some
> loops over observations and over characters. It seems terribly
> cumbersome and inefficient for large datasets.
>
> Does anyone know a better way to achieve this?
>
> Thank you,
> ______________________
> Jorge Eduardo Pérez Pérez
>
> PD: I am hoping that the Spanish characters make it through the plain
> text encoding and are displayed correctly when you get this e-mail. If
> not, then probably this e-mail will not make much sense, specially to
> speakers of languages without special characters. Sorry about that.
>
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>


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