replace if with no real changes made

[Lijuan Xie]

Dear Statalist,

I have a variable State with storage type str3. I want to creat a dummy variable, 1 when State equals "CT", 0 for else. So I generate a new dummy as below:

gen New_England = 0
replace New_England = 1 if State == "CT"

But 0 real changes made.

I am confused which step is wrong. Forgive me that I may ask a silly easy question.. And thank you for your help!

Best regard
Lijuan

[Andrew Musau]

The observations may contain spaces. Try

replace State= trim(State)
replace New_England = 1 if State == "CT"

If this does not solve it, present a data example using dataex.

[Lijuan Xie]

thank you, Andrew! It works! But could you please explain what "trim" is?

[Andrew Musau]

strtrim(s)
Description: s without leading and trailing blanks (ASCII space character char(32)); equivalent to strltrim(strrtrim(s))

strtrim(" this ") = "this"
Domain s: strings
Range: strings without leading or trailing blanks

So it's a string function that eliminates leading and trailing blanks (spaces). The usual way to find information about commands, functions, etc. is to type <<help commandname>>, for example, in this case

help trim()

[Ahmad Mobariz]

Andrew Musau I have similar problem. I want to replace values of a string variable from another language to English. I trimed the variable to make sure there is no leading blank space, but still it does not work. It says 0 changes. Here is the variable I would I am working on:

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str38 gender
"
 اناث" 
"
 اناث" 
"
 ذکور" 
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
end

but it says 0 changes made. Is there anything with the data type or unicode that I do not understand?

[Andrew Musau]

As far as I can see, there are no leading spaces in the string. The first quotation mark is imported in a different observation from the word and more bytes are allocated to the string than needed. Install leftalign from SSC by Robert Picard to change the display format. You can also, in addition:

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str38 gender
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 ذکور"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
"
 اناث"
end
ssc install leftalign, replace
leftalign gender
drop if missing(gender)
recast str10 gender
browse

[Ahmad Mobariz]

As far as I can see, there are no leading spaces in the string. The first quotation mark is imported in a different observation from the word and more bytes are allocated to the string than needed. Install leftalign from SSC by Robert Picard to change the display format. You can also, in addition:

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str38 gender
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
ذکور"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
"
اناث"
end
ssc install leftalign, replace
leftalign gender
drop if missing(gender)
recast str10 gender
browse

Thanks Andrew Musau. This problem is resolved. Your input was helpful!