I have a string variable called, "categories", which looks as below:
However, as you can see, some observations were listed under "Category 1" and others under "category 1", but I essentially want to sum them together where the total for category 1 would be=(3686 + 36)= 3722.
categories| Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
Category 1 | 3,686 10.53 10.53
category 1 | 36 0.10 10.63
category 10 | 54 0.15 10.79
category 11 | 1,122 3.21 13.99
category 2 | 615 1.76 15.75
category 3 | 15,333 43.80 59.55
category 4 | 12,694 36.26 95.81
category 5 | 234 0.67 96.48
category 6 | 110 0.31 96.79
category 7 | 983 2.81 99.60
category 8 | 35 0.10 99.70
category 9 | 105 0.30 100.00
From this I guess that your unnamed variable is string but not consistently assigned.
replace whatever = lower(whatever)
would be one of several ways to map Category 1 to category 1. Better yet to work with
gen betteryet = real(word(whatever, 2))
as the wording category is not helpful and if you have categories 1 to 11 you might as well see them in that order.