Truncate string with different numbers of characters

[Emmanuelle Belanger]

Hi,
I am trying to drop the last four characters of a string variable with different numbers of letters. All the characters to be removed are exactly ".wav" and they are always the last four characters.
Substring won't work because I cannot count position from the left. Any other ideas?
Thank you,
Emma

[Carole J. Wilson]

-subinstr- instead:

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str9 var1
"a.wav"    
"aa.wav"  
"aaaaa.wav"
end

clonevar new_var1=var1
replace new_var1=subinstr(var1, ".wav", "", .)

[Rich Goldstein]

you say you "cannot count position from the left." but you want to count from the right since you want the last 4 characters; see

help f_substr

you will see that at least two of the examples do exactly that

[Emmanuelle Belanger]

Thank you, the text substitution command worked.