In addition to other comments, note that -trim()-
removes marginal (leading or trailing) spaces,
not embedded spaces.
Thus it is not the tool for this problem.
Nick
[email protected]
Neil Shephard
> > I have variables of the format in one file from dhs
> > caseid1
> > 1002 9
> > 100211
> > in a separate file I concatenate two variables and the
> format becomes
> > caseid1 10029 100211 what I would like to do is to eliminate the
> > blanks from the variables in each file using trim but
> cannot get it to
> > work, and then to split the variable caseid1 into two variables to
> > remove the blank in the middle and then rejoin the two variables so
> > that I can merge
> >
> > the one file has details relating to household, one line per
> > household, the second file has details relating to the household
> > member so want the household details to be applied to all household
> > members can anyone help
> >
>
> Theres no need to split and concatenate the variables before
> merging, a very simple
> way to remove the spaces would be to take your first file
> which contains the spaces in
> the variable caseid1 and do something like...
>
> gen str temp = subinstr(caseid1, " ","", .)
> drop caseid1
> rename temp caseid1
> sort caseid1
> merge caseid1 using file2
>
> This assumes that the storage type of the caseid1 in the
> second file is string (which I
> suspect its likely to be as you say you concatenated two
> variables together and -egen
> caseid1 = concat(x y)- results in a string).
>
> The 'trick' is to use the subinstr(s1, s2, s3, n) (see -man
> strfun-) which substitutes string
> s2 for string s3 in string s1 and does so n times.
>
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