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Re: st: replace and strpos
From
Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: replace and strpos
Date
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:00:43 +0100
Daniel had presumably not seen my post when writing this, but the
answer to his question is that "W1" and "NW1" are only the starts of
the postcodes.
Nick
On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Daniel Feenberg <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2012, Ona McCarthy wrote:
>> I have a list of around 300 postcodes that are string variables. I need to
>> change the postcode strings into their corresponding borough. I succeeded in
>> doing this to some extent by writing commands for each string value using
>> replace and strops. E.g.:
>>
>> replace borough = "Camden" if strpos(postcode, "NW1")
>>
>> A problem arises when I run all the commands and it comes to a postcode
>> that contains some characters that are also in another postcode, i.e. it
>> overwrites the original.
>>
>> E.g. the above "Camden" is overwritten by "Westminster" when this command
>> is run:
>>
>> replace borough = "Westminster" if strpos(postcode, "W1")
>>
>> Because it shares the "W1".
>>
>> Is there any way I can tell Stata to look for the EXACT postcode? I've
>> looked all around and can't figure it out.
>>
>
> I am interested in why the character comparison operator isn't suitable:
>
> replace borough = "Westinster" if postcode == "W1"
>
> Alternatively, one could create a file of postcodes and boroughs, and merge
> it with the in-memory dataset by borough.
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