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RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks


From   Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To   "'[email protected]'" <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks
Date   Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:56:04 +0100

In addition to Eric's good advice, if the blanks really are just common or garden spaces " ", then 

. replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, " ", "", .)

is the way to go, similarly to his bottom line. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Eric Booth

If by 'blanks' you mean 'spaces' then first take a look at -help trim-.  Sometimes blanks or spaces are other, invisible characters.  To find those I use a combination of -charlist-, -ascii- (or -asciiplot-) all user-written programs from SSC.  After installing these programs you can check for these characters with something like:

***********!
replace myvar = trim(myvar)
charlist myvar
di "`r(ascii)'"
ascii      //compare the char list with what should be there
**or:
asciiplot
**let's say, you found that your string included invisible char 20, then:
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, "`=char(20)'" , "" , . )
************!

On Aug 11, 2011, at 10:28 AM, Kwaku Damoah wrote:

> Please can someone tell me how to remove embedded blanks from variables.

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