The problem is the space between your function name
-length- and its argument.
The correct syntax is not
length (s)
but
length(s)
Incidentally, I don't think it follows that every
string should be the same length for _any_ purpose.
In general, that would require some padding by spaces. which can
be very wasteful of storage. I am not clear
exactly what you want to do, but I've never found
padding by spaces essential (well, not since
Stata extended the range of string formats some years
ago), so there will be a better solution.
Nick
[email protected]
Julia A. Gamas
>
> I am trying to determine the length of a string variable
> because this length
> changes in each observation and I want to work with substr,
> so I need the
> variable to be the same size accross observations. But I'm
> getting an error
> message that I simply don't understand how to fix.
>
> I write: generate long = length (vp40_11), vp40_11 is the
> string varible
> whose length I want.
> Error message reads: "too few variables specification","r(102)"
> However, the help section says to write
> "generate varname = exp" and exp in this case is length (s),
> where "s" is
> the string variable.
>
> So I can't really understand which variable is missing. Can
> anybody help me
> out?
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