My aim is to clean a given local from _ and all numbers following the underscore at the end of the words. Assume that I have underscores followed by numbers at the end of the words only.
By using subinstr(), I am able to specify that I want to eliminate _1 (and possibly loop over different numbers), but the double-loop syntax seems to be overly complicated for such task:
local list_x `" "rep78_3" "make_1" "price_1" "mpg_2" "'
local n_x : list sizeof list_x
forvalues j = 1/`n_x' {
local varname: word `j' of `list_x'
local clean_name: subinstr local varname "_1" ""
display "`clean_name'"
}
I tried to look into regexm() and regexs(), but I am not quite sure how to set up the code.
I understand there might be multiple ways to solve this.
Maybe there is a simpler way to address the issue that I cannot see?
With the new version of regex functions in Stata 14, you can replace all matches at once.
. local list_x `" "rep78_3" "make_1" "price_1" "mpg_2" "'
. local fixed = ustrregexra(`"`list_x'"', "_[0-9]+","")
. dis `"`fixed'"'
"rep78" "make" "price" "mpg"