st: Stata does not understand some strings

[Pablo Bonilla <pablo.bonilla1234@gmail.com>]

Dear Statalist,



I have a problem the following problem: I wrote a program that is
meant to remove all special Spanish accents from strings so I can have
a clean sentence to compare it with other strings. My program has the
following lines:



***************

local unos "á é í ó ú ñ Á É Í Ó Ú Ñ ü"

local doss "a e i o u n a e i o u n u"



forvalue i = 1(1)13 {   // Loop to replace accents from Spanish

                        local uno : word `i' of  `unos'

                        local dos : word `i' of   `doss'

                        local label :       subinstr local label
"`uno'" "`dos'", all

}

******************

However it is not replacing the accents because, when I looked at the
trace, Stata is understanding something totally different. Like this:

***********************

      - local unos "á é í ó ú ñ Á É Í Ó Ú Ñ ü"

      - local doss "a e i o u n a e i o u n u"

      - forvalue i = 1(1)13 {

      - local uno : word `i' of `unos'

      = local uno : word 1 of á é í ó ú ñ Á É Í Ó Ú Ñ ü

      - local dos : word `i' of `doss'

      = local dos : word 1 of a e i o u n a e i o u n u

      - local label : subinstr local label "`uno'" "`dos'", all

      = local label : subinstr local label "á" "a", all

      = local label0 : subinstr local label0 "á" "a", all

-          }

************************

As you can see Stata reads “á”  instead of “á” and so on. Do you have
any idea why it is happening? And, more importan, do you know how to
solve it ?



Thank you so much.


-- 
----

Pablo Bonilla

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