st: destring

[P chrisman <peggyc@u.washington.edu>]

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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