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st: destring


From   P chrisman <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   st: destring
Date   Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:30:33 -0700

Hi List,

I am having a great deal of trouble changing strings to numeric. I have a variable "drug_1" that is a strg40 with 32 unique values (I did not create this data set!). Examples are:

"TESTOSTERONE CYP 200MG/ML INJ (IN OIL) "
"TESTOSTERONE ENANTH. 200MG/ML 1ML "
"TESTOSTERONE ENANTHATE 200MG/ML INJ 5ML "
"TESTOSTERONE ENANTHATE 200MG/ML INJ 5ML "
TESTOSTERONE (ANDRODERM) 5MG/24HRS PATCH

Drug dose is the explore variable and the PI wants to look at outcome by mode of administration and dose, so for the example here I need to have a drug_1 variable with mode 1=IM and 2=patch and dose 200mg/ml, 200mg/5ml and 5mg/24hr.

I have tried encode, but I do not think I can use that because the strings also contain numbers(please correct if this is not true). I tried destring with the following errors:

destring Drug_1, replace
Drug_1 contains non-numeric characters; no replace

. destring Drug_1, replace ignore("testosterone")
Drug_1 contains characters not specified in ignore(); no replace

I could not find anything in FAQ that was similar to this problem. I would appreciate ANY HELP as I have drug_1 through drug_5 for 384 subjects and can do this the long and painful way, but would prefer not.
Thanks, Peggy


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