st: From: Richard Moverare <richard.moverare@gmail.com>

[owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu]

Dear Statalist,

I have a small problem that I guess I should be able to solve, but I
got stuck. I have a string variable that consists of 1-3 numbers,
space, and then a description. The description varies in terms of
numer of words and characters.

What I would like to do is to create a numeric variable where the
values are the numbers in the beginning of the string and then use the
rest of the string as a value label. The dataset includes a number of
duplicates for this specific variable (one of the reason for doing
this conversion is to make the dataset smaller in size). The first
part is no problem using -word-, and I can get what I want as a label
by getting the second word and those that follow, but I got stuck
defining the labels for the variable.

The variables looks something like this:
234 Used cars, no batteries
22 Bottles - unspecifed
234 Used cars, no batteries
440 N/A
and so on.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

All the best, Rick
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