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st: substring help


From   Heather Gold <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   st: substring help
Date   Tue, 07 Jun 2005 10:32:30 -0400

Dear Fellow Listers -

Someone has probably figured this out previously, but I can't seem to find exactly what I need in the archives or help...

I have a string variable with county and state names merged as one string 15 characters long. I need to get rid of the trailing state name.
For example, I have:

Genesee NY
Bronx NY
Queens NY

And I want to have only:
Genesee
Bronx
Queens

I tried
gen cnty=substr(cntyname, -2,2)

But that does the "opposite" of what I want, ie, returns "NY".
Because the county name varies in length, I can't just do a substring of a specific length, starting from the beginning of the variable.

Shouldn't there be an obvious solution? I can't find it.

Thanks,
Heather


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