st: Searching for words in strings

["Wallace, John" <John_Wallace@affymetrix.com>]

Dear Statalist

I'd like to search a comment field for a specific word, such as can be done with Excel's "Search(find_text,within_text,[start_num])" function.  I'd like to do it interactively, rather than as a program (it looks like a program using -tokenize- would be one approach), but the -match- and -word- string functions don't appear to be what I'm looking for.  I have a list of 1000 records, all with a "comment" field that may or may not contain a word I want, buried within an otherwise random string of characters.  What I'd like is a command that I could type in thus:

.browse if {command}("wafer",var_comment) !=.

Does such a command exist?  It seems like it would be a useful tool for browsing non-standard text fields...

 

John Wallace

Research Associate

Affymetrix Inc

john_wallace@affymetrix.com