Richard,
your solution will leave Susanne with her original problem, having a
variable with more than 80 characters. So building on your approach I
would suggest:
//generate word2, containing all characters from variable word1 located at
//position 51 or greater
gen str word2=substr(word1,51,.)
//replace word1 with an extract of its first 50 characters max
replace word1=substr(word1,1,50)
//make sure word1 is no longer a str102 type
compress word1
Regards,
Sebastian
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