st: String function headache.

[Scott Talkington <talkings@gmu.edu>]

I just can't seem to make this work.  What I want to do is search for 
any occurrence of the "#" character in a string variable and set a flag 
for that observation.  I'm searching 6 different strings labeled 
something like mystring1 mystring2 etc. and the flags are mynumber1 
mynumber2 etc..
So my do file:

forvalues x=1/6 {
foreach y in # {
replace mynumber `x'= strmatch(mistring`x', "`y'")
}
}

I just listed one character in the y list above, but in reality I'm not 
having a problem with normal strings like "APT" but with wildcards and 
with the number sign character itself.
I assumed that placing a "?" character iyn the search string (s2) would 
match zero or one characters + the "#" but it seems to be matching all 
strings with one character that are either a  number  or a letter.  Huh?
If I include the wildcard (either the asterisk or the question mark) 
*anywhere* (either in the "foreach" part of the do file or in the 
"replace" command) it just doesn't work the way I expect it to.  There's 
a difference between what I get depending on how many quotes I use  and 
where as well, but I'm just not getting anything that does what I want 
it to.  I've even tried using the backslash character to indicate that I 
don't want the "#" to be read as an operator, but I'm not even sure 
where to put the backslash or how to arrange the quotation marks.  It's 
driving me nuts.  There's some rule here that I'm just not getting.
--Scott
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