Re: st: How to get rid of leading and trailing letters and symbols?

[Ulrich Kohler <kohler@wzb.eu>]

Ekatarina,

you should get that using regular expressions (see help regexp). I don't
use regular expression very often in Stata, but in my favourite Editor,
Emacs, the regular expression to find a number of arbitrary length
would be 

\(\[0-9]+\)

which would store the number in \1. The Stata regular expression should
work very similar. 

Uli




Am Mittwoch, den 26.10.2011, 10:37 +0100 schrieb Ekaterina Hertog:
> Dear All,
> I have got a dataset where the id variable is a part of a web-link. It 
> can contain letters followed by the id number: (e.g. 
> /profile/?id=9596986) or it can contain the id number in the middle 
> (e.g. /profile/?id=9591886&reftype=detail). I need to create a variable 
> which will only contain the number that is part of the id variable. I 
> also need to be able to distinguish between the cases where the number 
> is trailing vs. cases where it is in the middle. I looked at the advice 
> available on removing leading or trailing 0s in Stata 11 
> (http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/leadingzeros.html), but in my 
> case I cannot actually specify the letters and symbols that lead or 
> trail so I am stuck. I use Stata 11.
> Any advice will be very much appreciated,
> Ekaterina
> 
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