Re: st: How do I split a string variable without spaces by capital letters?

[Andrew Dickens <adickens@econ.yorku.ca>]

Thanks for the tip about -moss-. Much appreciated to both Robert and Eric.

Nick, thanks for clarifying. I'm relatively new to this, and your  
explanation makes things much clearer. Noted for future reference.

Best,
Andrew

Quoting Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>:

> I like -moss- too for a variety of reasons.
>
> It's important to understand, however, why the approach with -split-
> does not work. -split- expects that strings can be parsed into
> substrings using separators. Part of the definition of separators is
> that they can thrown away, but that's not true here.
>
> Independently of that, the reason that -split- did nothing to the
> original variables is that it was looking for literal strings such as
>
> "upper(a-z)"
>
> as separators, and did not find any examples. The syntax is not
> illegal, but it's a long way from doing what you wanted, as -split-
> does not understand regular expressions and won't apply functions to
> them either.
>
> split v1, p(`c(ALPHA)')
>
> would have chopped whenever it saw any of A ... Z but those upper-case
> letters would have been thrown out too.
>
> Nick
> njcoxstata@gmail.com

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