how to eliminate "," thousand separator to destring a variable

[Guest]

Hello everybody,


I have downloaded some data that Stata (Stata 12 version) is not able to read as numeric because of the "," thousand separator. I run:
destring rgdp2010, replace
but I get the error:
rgdp2010 contains nonnumeric characters; no replace
how can I substitute "," with "" (nothing) in these observations?

Thanks to anyone will help

[Nick Cox]

See the help for destring for the ignore() option.

. clear

. set obs 1
number of observations (_N) was 0, now 1

. gen problem = "1,234,567.8"

. destring problem, gen(solution) ignore(",")
problem: character , removed; solution generated as double

. list

     +-------------------------+
     |     problem    solution |
     |-------------------------|
  1. | 1,234,567.8   1234567.8 |
     +-------------------------+

Cross-posted at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-some-observat Our policy on cross-posting is explicit: you are asked to tell us about it.

[Guest]

Sorry, you are perfectly right. I didn't know anything about this. I will be careful next time, I will read about the rules of these forums.