st: RE: Dropping parts of strings (i.e. Baldwin County becomes Baldwin)

[Andrew Maurer <Andrew.Maurer@qrm.com>]

Maybe not the most efficient way, but this works (replaces internal underscores with spaces):

local name __united_kingdom__+___county
di trim(subinstr(substr(`"`name'"',1,strpos(`"`name'"',"+")-1),"_"," ",.))

or for if your variable is named "oldname":
gen newname = trim(subinstr(substr(oldname,1,strpos(oldname,"+")-1),"_"," ",.))

(if you want internal underscores then gen newname2 = subinstr(newname," ","_",.)

Andrew Maurer 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Cody Cook
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 11:02 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: Dropping parts of strings (i.e. Baldwin County becomes Baldwin)

Hi Stata Helpers, 

I have a ton of census data that I'm trying to merge with some other data. The other data only has county names, not FIPS. 

For the census data, it is formatted as __name___ + ___ census type ___ where census type is either "County", "Borough", "Census Area" and maybe a few more. This is all in one string. I want to only keep the part that identifies the specific county. 

Basically, is there a way to say "if county includes "XXXX" replace without "XXXX"" 

Best,

Cody
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