In addition to Joseph's positive suggestion, note that the help for
-destring- is quite explicit:
"destring treats both empty strings "" and "." as indicating sysmiss (.)
and interprets the strings ".a", ".b", ..., ".z" as the extended missing
values .a, .b, ..., .z"
Thus:
1. Using -destring- is quite consistent with a user's desire to have
extended missing values.
2. But as Joseph exemplifies you need to arrange any conversions outside
of -destring-. Any alternative accommodation of extended missing values
within -destring- would just complicate the syntax of -destring- to no
obvious net gain.
Nick
[email protected]
Joseph Coveney
I'm not sure about a single line of code (unless someone has already
written a
convenience module to do it), but you could do something like
replace var = "." + lower(substr(var, 1, 1)) ///
if inrange(lower(substr(var, 1, 1,)), "a", "z")
and then -destring- the result.
Bert Jung wrote:
I have a string variable that contains mostly numbers but also
informative missing values like "dk" and "na". I would like to
-destring- but retain the
cause for the missing values, i.e. produce extended missing values
such as .d and .n where appropriate. -destring- apparently only
accommodates the system missing value ".".
I could write a few lines (e.g. copy into a second variable and then
replace) but wondered if there is a one-line way to coax -destring-
into producing these extended missing values?
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