Re: st: Extract identifier in the middle of a string variable

[Robert Picard <picard@netbox.com>]

Here is how I would do it with -moss- (SSC). The pattern looks for
strings that start with "NYSE:" and matches any characters that follow
that are not a ";". Since some observations do not end with a ";", the
final "*" makes the last semi-colon optional. All NYSE identifiers are
matched. I assume that when there are multiple identifiers, they all
start the same way so I then remove the period and what follows in the
first match if there was a second match ("D.PRI" become "D" for the
last observation).

clear

input str70 s
"BMV:STP N;  DB:S9H;  NYSE:STP;  XTRA:S9H"
"BMV:STP N;  DB:S9H; XTRA:S9H"
"BASE:C;  BAYB:C;  BMV:C *;  BST:TRVC;  BVL:C;  DB:TRVC;  NYSE:C.PRH;"
"NYSE:C;  NYSE:C.PRI;  SOMA:CTGP11B;  TSE:8710;  XTRA:TRV"
"SOMA:CTGP11B;  TSE:8710;  XTRA:TRV;  NYSE:D.PRI;  NYSE:D;  "
end

moss s, match("NYSE:([^;]+);*") regex

replace _match1 = regexr(_match1,"\..*","") if !mi(_match2)
list _match1 s


On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 5:19 AM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried various solutions with -moss- (SSC) but kept messing up the
> regular expression. Robert Picard is more fluent than I with regexp.
>
> Here is a more simple-minded approach:
>
> clear
> input str80 myid
> "BASE:C;  BAYB:C;  BMV:C *;  BST:TRVC;  BVL:C;  DB:TRVC;  NYSE:C.PRH;"
> "NYSE:C;  NYSE:C.PRI;  SOMA:CTGP11B;  TSE:8710;  XTRA:TRV"
> end
> gen wc = wordcount(myid)
> gen nyse = ""
> su wc, meanonly
> qui forval i = 1/`r(max)' {
>         replace nyse = nyse + substr(word(myid, `i'), 6, .) + " " if
> substr(word(myid, `i'), 1, 4) == "NYSE"
> }
> replace nyse = trim(subinstr(nyse, ";", "", .))
> split nyse
> local nsplit : word count `r(varlist)'
> gen shortest = nyse1
> qui forval i = 2/`nsplit' {
>         replace shortest = nyse`i' if length(nyse`i') < length(shortest) &
> length(nyse`i')
> }
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Ghislaine Vantomme
> <ghislaine.vantomme@gmail.com> wrote:
>> BASE:C;  BAYB:C;  BMV:C *;  BST:TRVC;  BVL:C;  DB:TRVC;  NYSE:C.PRH;
>> NYSE:C;  NYSE:C.PRI;  SOMA:CTGP11B;  TSE:8710;  XTRA:TRV
>>
>>
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