Re: st: Parse question

[adiallo5@worldbank.org]

Thanks to both Nick Cox and Nick Winter.
The two solutions worked fine.
You're genius.
Best regards.
Amadou.



                                                                                                                                               
                      n j cox                                                                                                                  
                      <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>           To:       statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu                                                
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                      09/22/2005 11:12 AM                                                                                                      
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I was wondering this the other day but didn't
remember anything. You could try -tokenize-
using the character in question, but then
you have to keep track of occurrences at
the beginning and end as well as in the middle.

Given this,

*! NJC 1.0.0 22 Sept 2005
program charcount, sclass
             version 8
             args string char garbage
             if `"`char'"' == "" | `"`garbage'"' != "" error 198

             local c = 0
             forval i = 1/`= length(`"`string'"')' {
                         if substr(`"`string'"',`i',1) == `"`char'"' local ++c
             }

             sreturn local count = `c'
end

you should fire at it a quoted string and a quoted character,
e.g.

charcount "`loc'" "a"

and it will leave behind -s(count)- with the answer.

di s(count)

There's also no doubt a Mata solution.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

adiallo5@worldbank.org

Is there any way to count the number of occurence of a particular
character in a local or global macro?
For example:
local loc (a mama baba).
I would like to count the number of occurences of "a" , in this case 5.
Or local loc "There; That; This)
I want to count the number of occurences of ";".
I am writing an ado for a work and I can't figure how to do it.
I have a look at macrolists but there is no mention of that case.


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