Re: st: Removing quotation marks in string variables

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

The logic is this.

1. You want to look for " as a literal character, not a delimiter.

2. Therefore compound double quotes `" "' must be used as delimiters.

replace tags = subinstr(tags, `"""',  "", .)

The awkward argument is

`"    left compound double quote
"    double quote to be taken literally
"'   right compound double quote

A trick to avoid all this is to note that  " is char(34)  [see
-asciiplot- from SSC for a cheat sheet] so that

replace tags = subinstr(tags, char(34), "", .)

But hang on: "Jackson, Collin" is recognisably one field: if you strip
the " you will lose that. So, this may not be your best strategy.

Note also -split-.


Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 5 July 2013 17:57, John Adam Roberts <roberts.john.adam@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a dataset that is full of strings that look like this:
>
> ATUS00001213, "ATUS00001256","Jackson,Collin"
>
> I'm going to separate these values into different variables and I'm
> wondering how to remove the "s from the dataset.
>
> For other characters, like commas, I would use the following command:
> replace tags = subinstr(tags,",","",.)
>
> but
> replace tags = subinstr(tags,""","",.)
> replace tags = subinstr(tags,'"',"",.)
> replace tags = subinstr(tags,""",.,.)
> replace tags = subinstr(tags,'"',.,.)
> don't work.
>
> Thanks in advance for the help!
>
> -Adam
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