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From | Rijo John <rmjohn@gmail.com> |
To | stata <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: using regex |
Date | Thu, 2 Dec 2010 17:22:26 -0500 |
Hi statlist, I have a string variable (code) with state and county codes merged. For example, the observation 12001 indicate that the first 2 digits are state codes and the remaining 3 digits are county codes. I want to create a new variable (fips) only with the state code. I use the following gen fips = regexs(0) if(regexm(code, "[0-9][0-9]")) and it works fine when the code contains 5 digits. But if a particular state code is only 1 digit and thereby the string "code" only has a total of 4 digits the trick above does not work. In such cases I want to only extract the first digit. Can someone help? Thanks. Rijo. * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/