Conor,
An illustration of your data might help. For now, I assume that your data started out something like this, where origob is the original observation number for each group of names, newid is the new observation number, and X and Y are some other variables:
origob names X Y
1 "Alex Charles Henry" 123 456
2 "Mary Liz" 789 324
And now looks something like this:
origob newid names X Y
1 1 "Alex Charles Henry" 123 456
1 2 "Alex Charles Henry" 123 456
1 3 "Alex Charles Henry" 123 456
2 1 "Mary Liz" 789 324
2 2 "Mary Liz" 789 324
And you want this:
origob newid names name X Y
1 1 "Alex Charles Henry" "Alex" 123 456
1 2 "Alex Charles Henry" "Charles" 123 456
1 3 "Alex Charles Henry" "Henry" 123 456
2 1 "Mary Liz" "Mary" 789 324
2 2 "Mary Liz" "Liz" 789 324
If this is right, you can go from the second stage to the third stage by doing the following:
bysort origob: gen name = word(names, _n)
Hope this helps.
Howie
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 2:37 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: Extract elements from string variables
In the data set I have a string variable with the names of several people. However, I want to look at the relationship across each individual, so I am trying to separate the names.
What I have done: expanded the observations based on how many individuals are in each observation's string variable. Labeled the duplicate observations 1, 2, 3, etc.
What I need now, is a command that will take the number in my duplicates and take the corresponding individual's name with respect to its position in the string variable, separated by a comma.
Any insight would be helpful.
Thanks,
Conor
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