On Jul 23, 2007, at 8:32 PM, Susan Olivia wrote:
Thanks so much for your suggestions. Unfortunately, it didn't work
for me
after trying several of suggested solutions.
I think the culprit is due to having the id as numeric variable
that comes
with 18 digits and stored as double as suggested by Profs Buis and
Cox.
Re: your original question, the following works for me:
. clear
. set obs 1
obs was 0, now 1
. gen double id = 610102001001010300
. gen str4 newvar = substr(string(id,"%20.0g"),10,4)
. list
+--------------------+
| id newvar |
|--------------------|
1. | 6.101e+17 0010 |
+--------------------+
Any further insights on how to deal with this in STATA is much
appreciated
since I am trying to avoid taking a brute-force approach in Excel/
Notepad to
split the variable and bring it back to STATA.
Assuming your original data are in Excel, I suspect you'd be in much
better shape overall if you read the "id" variable in as a string
from the start.
Hope this helps.
-- Mike
P.S.: No need to shout the name of the program! (See the below-
cited FAQ.)
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