RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks

["Kwaku Damoah" <kdamoah@gmx.com>]

Thanks Nick & Eric it has worked just fine
Kwaku

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: 11 August 2011 17:56
To: 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'
Subject: RE: st: warning: variable has embedded blanks

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 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

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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