Combining two variables to create a new one

[Ana Costa]

Dear all,
I'm working with a large household survey (over a 40,000 observations) but I don't have an id number for each observation in my data set. What I have is an id for each household (idhh) and an number for each person (idmember) in the household.

I want to create an unique id for each observation.

I tried using the command "gen newid = idhh + idmember" (both idhh and idmember are in the string format).
However I have different decimal places for the observations.

I would like to know if there's a command to create this new variable (so that my new variable "newid" has the same decimal places for all observations) combining two other variables?

Thank you all!

[Jorrit Gosens]

I believe what you are looking for is concatenation, see page 17 of the egen manual: http://www.stata.com/manuals13/degen.pdf
Using this youd end up with equal decimal places for your newid, provided the originals had equal decimal places to start with.

[Ana Costa]

Thank you Jorrit for your reply.
The command you said didn't work because for the "idhh" variable, the observations have different decimal places.
You can see above what I have (columns idhh and idmember) and what I want (column newid)

[Jorrit Gosens]

Presuming idhh is max 5 numbers, below code works. Add zeros to taste

gen zeros = "00000"
egen idlong = concat(zeros idhh idmember)
gen idnew=substr(idlong,-6,.)

[Ana Costa]

That worked perfectly! Thank you!!