Re: st: extract string portion

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You allude to functions -regexm()- etc. There is no -regex- command.
Regular expressions are fine when they are the best tool, but plainer
string functions often work as well or better.

In your examples, naming your variable -myvar-,

gen lastpart = substr(myvar, strpos(myvar, ":") + 1, .)

would extract

EXC))
TTEC))

after which

replace lastpart = subinstr(lastpart, ")", "", .)

would remove any ")"

What could go wrong with this? Perhaps colons ":" could occur earlier.
In that case

gen lastpart = reverse(myvar)
replace lastpart = substr(lastpart, 1, strpos(lastpart, ":") - 1)
replace lastpart = subinstr(lastpart, ")", "", .)
replace lastpart = reverse(lastpart)

looks for the last colon, etc.

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:14 AM, thomas bourveau
<thomas.bourveau@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am working on a dataset where I need to extract an identifier for
> the parent company of my observations. Here are two examples:
>
> OnlineChoice.com, Inc. (Exelon Corporation (NYSE:EXC))
> Peppers & Rogers Group (TeleTech Holdings Inc. (NasdaqGS:TTEC))
>
> As you can see the dataset provides the name of the company, its stock
> exchange and its identifier (the Ticker) in the same row.
>
> I'm interested in retrieving the Ticker (EXC and TTEC in the
> abovementioned examples).
>
> I have read some things on using the regex command to extract figures
> from a string expression, but I did not found how to select only a
> string portion of it.
>
> If anyone has an idea, I will be grateful and try to implement it.
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