Non-English letters: changing contents of string variables

[Guest]

Hi
I'm really struggeling with this one. I have received data that include Danish/Norwegian letters (æ ø a Æ Ø Å) in a string variable. Stata doesn't recognise these letters well (would be great if this is improved in a future version of Stata, i.e. recognising standard letters in European languages, similar to or equivalent to the German Umlaut).

I want to change those string values. The first attempt was obviously...

replace Skole="Boe ungdomsskole" if Skole=="Bø ungdomsskole"

Stata responds
. replace Skole="Boe ungdomsskole" if Skole=="B¿ ungdomsskole"
... and no changes are made

I'm new to Stata and love it. I have realised you are supposed not to use non-English letters in Stata, but we cannot always control the nature of the data we receive (e.g. from people using SPSS). I have done extensive searches and tried many methods (including substr) to be able to change strings in a string variable containing non-English letters. No luck, and StatTransfer did not solve the problem. It would be great if someone (at Stata?) might develop a program, easily downloadable, that solves issues with non-English characters, both when used in values in a string variable and in variable names.

But for now... I would be very thankful for any workaround that solves the problem!

Regards,
Guest

[Nick Cox]

Stata users in Scandinavia may well have good solutions here. The following touches on things of wider interest, which should make it of some use.

I suggest that you work in terms of the function char()

Some of us developed a program to give people an easy cheat sheet depending on what alphabet their Stata is recognising.

ssc inst asciiplot
set scheme s1color 
asciiplot

Actually you can get something similar more directly by just displaying the results of calls to char() in a loop, but many people seem to find the entire plot a little more interesting and more congenial. If you get this problem all the time it may be worth printing it out or storing it as a Stata graph.



So, on my machine the first character you mention is char(230). If you follow this route, you can do things like

 
replace myname = subinstr(myname, char(230), "ae", .)

Naturally, it's up to you what is to be used as replacement text. Note that the function here is subinstr(), not substr().

The next stage is to bundle several such translation lines into a do-file. The format of such lines would be

 
replace `1' = subinstr(`1', char(230), "ae", .)

and you would call it (say it's myfix.do)

 
do myfix myname

and the argument myname is then mapped to `1' inside the do file. (It's the first argument (of 1) specified on the command line.)

[Guest]

Thanks a lot, Nick!

For others interested, here is a code that should work with Danish/Norwegian characters.
It should be easy to adapt this to characters unique to other languages.

​replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(198), "Ae", .)
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(216), "Oe", .)
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(197), "Aa", .)

replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(230), "ae", .)
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(248), "oe", .)
replace myvar = subinstr(myvar, char(229), "aa", .)

[Nick Cox]

Thanks for the report. Another possibility is to write your own egen function to produce a new variable.

(Metacomment: I am playing with two conventions in various posts for brief code mentions, mycuriousprogram versus mycuriousprogram.)