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

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Thanks for this, but please note my top line. -moss- (SSC) is to be
preferred here, I think.
Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 19 August 2013 18:16, Andrew Dickens <adickens@econ.yorku.ca> wrote:
> 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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