Change a letter in the string variable

[Camila Plaza]

Dear all,

I am working on a massive data base and I am having a problem with the strings.

I have several cases of the "ä" character being read in differently (with the currency sign) - I want to change the "ä" for "ae" in all the cases.

One case for example would be the string variable: "Orthopädischechirurgie"
Stata does not seem to recognize the "ä" and so returns the following "Orthop¤Adischechirurgie"

Any thoughts on how I can change this to read: "Orthopaedischechirurgie"?

I am using Stata13.

Many thanks and best,
Cam

[eric_a_booth]

To help find the ascii characters of interest, I'd download the packages -ascii- and -charlist- using -findit-.

Here's an example of how to make the substitution in Stata 13:

clear
set obs 2

input str40 y
`"Orthopädischechirurgie"'
end

g x =  `"Orthopädischechirurgie"'
g z = `"Orthop¤Adischechirurgie"' //my Stata 13 sees the ä though!

**stata sees the ¤A part as ascii characters 63 and 65 in var z!
charlist z
di `"`r(chars)'"'
di `"`r(ascii)'"'
ascii 
foreach j in x y  {
    replace `j' = subinstr(`j', `"`=char(138)'"', "ae", .)
    }
  
  replace z = subinstr(z, `"`=char(65)'`=char(63)'"', "ae", .) //doesnt work?
  replace z = subinstr(z, `"?A"', "ae", .) //works
    
    l

[Camila Plaza]

oh thank you so much! I had the codes for the ascii characters, but wasn't sure if I had to download packages for it.
I will give this a shot