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| From | Charles Vellutini <charles.vellutini@ecopa.com> |
| To | "statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu" <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
| Subject | st: Fuzzy collapse |
| Date | Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:03:57 -0800 |
Dear Statalisters, I have a string variable holding thousands of search keywords, many of them identical up to a few accents or characters. Here is a typical sample: keyword Obs1 télécommandes Obs2 télecommandes Obs3 télécomandes Obs4 telecommandes Obs5 télécommande etc. I would like to do a "fuzzy" collapse, that is, to group observations with near-identical keywords. I could write manual multiple -replace-'s to harmonize keywords, but given the size of the dataset and the variety of keywords, that is hardly feasible. I am aware of the -reclink- user-written command for fuzzy merging but that is for merging two datasets, not for collapsing observations within a dataset. It is not immediately evident to me how I could use -reclink- to solve my problem, but maybe that is feasible? Any suggestion much appreciated. Thanks, Charles * * 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/