Re: st: RE: strpos: cleaning string variables

[Emily Farchy <emily.farchy@sant.ox.ac.uk>]

Thanks a lot Nick,

This looks like a really useful command.

NB the loop dropped the generated vars at the end so it did run fine, but didn't accomplish what I needed, I'll try again with subinstr() command

Emily

On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Nick Cox wrote:

> -strpos()- is a function, not a command. 
> 
> You can eliminate substrings of length 1 if you wish using -subinstr()-. As -subinstr()- can delete more than one occurrence at a time it is likely to be an answer to your question about the n th occurrence. 
> 
> Your loop is going to fail second time around if only because you are then trying to -generate- variables that already exist. Again, you don't need to loop over , . & as you can work on them using separate commands within the loop. 
> 
> Nick 
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 
> 
> Emily Farchy
> 
> I would like to run a loop to transform some messy names into cleaner versions eg
> "Drs. H. Muslim Kasim, Ak"--> "Muslim Kasim"
> "Drs. Makmur Syahputra, Sh" -->"Makmur Syah Putra"
> "H Amru Helmy Daulay Sh" --> "Amru Helmy Daulay"
> 
> I was thinking of using the strpos command which seems like it might be useful but is there a way to get it to find the nth occurrence (eg of a space) and a way to eliminate substrings of for example 3 letters or less?
> 
> I was working on the following but get stuck when I pass the first occurence
> 
> foreach x of local xlist {
> 	
> 	**** get rid of . , or & in name (A, B --> A B; st. A -->  st A, A & B --> A and B)
> 	foreach z in , . & {
> 		qui gen `x'_bh= trim(substr(`x', 1, strpos(`x', "`z'")-1))
> 		qui gen `x'_ah= trim(substr(`x', strpos (`x', "`z'")+1, 50))
> 		qui gen `x'_mid= substr(`x', strpos (`x', "`z'"), 1)
> 
> 		replace `x'=trim(`x'_bh+" "+`x'_ah)
> 		replace `x'=trim(`x'_bh+" and "+`x'_ah) if `x'_mid=="&"
> 
> 		drop `x'_bh `x'_ah `x'_mid
> 		}
> 	}
> 
> 
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